THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
MODERN HISTORY
XII. THE SHIFTING
BALANCE Of
WORLD FORCES
1898 - 19-15
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
G.N. CLARK J. R. M. BUTLER J.P.T.BURY
THE LATE E.A.BEN1ANS
VOLUME XII
{second edition )
THE SHIFTING BALANCE
OF WORLD FORCES
1898-1945
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
When the need for a new edition of this
volume arose Dr David Thomson, the
original editor, was unable, owing to
other commitments, to undertake the
task of producing a revised edition,
and it was entrusted to a new editor.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN
HISTORY
VOLUME XII
THE SHIFTING BALANCE
OF WORLD FORCES
1898-1945
A second edition of Volume XII
The Era of Violence
EDITED BY
C. L. MOWAT
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1968
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press
Bentley House, zoo Euston Road, London, N.W. i
American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022
© Cambridge University Press 1968
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 57-14935
Standard Book Number: 521 04551 7
Printed in Great Britain
at the University Printing House, Cambridge
(Brooke Crutchley, University Printer)
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY SURVEY:
ON THE LIMITS OF MODERN HISTORY
By C. L. Mowat, Professor of History, University College
of North Wales , Bangor
Changing views of history page i
Scope of this volume 1-2
Some characteristics of the century 2-4
‘Modem’ or ‘contemporary’ 4
A new kind of world 5
Advances in science and technology 5-6
Effects of two world wars 6-8
‘One world’ 9
chapter H
THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
By David Thomson, Master of Sidney Sussex College and
Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge
The standards of living and social changes in different regions .... 10-11
Growth of population; movements of people n-12
Urbanisation 12-13
The influence of cheap transport 1 3—14
New conditions in industry 14-15
Changes in social structure 15-16
The sharpening of class conflicts in different countries 16-17
Nationalism 17-18
Rising standards of living . 18-20
Vital statistics in Europe 19
Improvement in health 20
Property more insecure 20-1
Mass unemployment 21
Demand for social justice 22-7
Universal suffrage; the status of women 22-4
Attitudes towards the family 24-6
Free public education 26-8
Mass emotion 28-9
Social services in Europe 29-32
Fiscal policies 30
Full employment 31
Mounting expenditure on amenities and luxuries 32
The popular press ; the cult of sport 33-6
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
THE WORLD ECONOMY: INTERDEPENDENCE
AND PLANNING
By Asa Briggs, Vice-Chancellor and Professor of History,
University of Sussex
First world war as a dividing line page 37
Temporary nature of pre-1914 system 37-9
1900-13: rise in industrial production 39
Europe the centre of economic power 40
United Kingdom industry geared to world trade 40-1
Growing influence of the U.S.A 41-2
United Kingdom as ‘conductor of the orchestra’ 42
Sources of discontent and disturbance 43
Origins of twentieth-century interventionism 44
Social insurance; tariffs; cartels and trusts 45-6
Socialisation of large-scale enterprise 46
Imperialism 47
Japan 47-8
Effect of wartime controls 48
Wartime economic mobilisation in Germany 49
Gradual expansion of controls in the United Kingdom 49-50
Economic disorganisation in Russia 50-1
International economic co-operation 51
Collapse of planning after 1918 51
German and French experiments 52
Instability of the post-war world 53-4
Waste of manpower and resources 54-5
Internal inflation; reparations and war debts 55-6
Europe’s dependence on the U.S.A 56
Return to gold 57
Poverty in the midst of plenty 58-9
Collapse of economy of the U.S.A. ; the Great Depression 59
Financial collapse in Europe 60
The United Kingdom abandons free trade and gold 61
The U.S.A. abandons gold; the New Deal 62-3
Management rather than planning 64-6
Soviet planning 66-70
German planning under National Socialism 70-5
World population, production and trade 75-7
Need for world-wide monetary system 77-8
Place of Europe within the world economic system 79-80
Social policies 81
Assistance from the U.S.A 82
National growth rates 83
Need to redefine economic ‘ interdependence ’ 84-5
Overall planning 85-6
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER IV
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
By Douglas McKie, Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy
of Science in the University of London
Changes towards the end of the nineteenth century page 87
Radioactivity and electrons 87-8
Rapid advances in the twentieth century 88-9
Astronomy : vastness of the universe 89
Researches of J. J. Thomson and Rutherford 91
Transmutations 9 2 ~3
Atomic weights and numbers 93
Changing scope of sciences 94~5
Vitamins and hormones 95
Organic chemistry; new drugs 95-6
Crystallography; physiology 97
Geology; meteorology 97-8
Physics; quantum theory; relativity 98-9
Biology; genetics 99-100
Descent of homo sapiens 100-1
Medicine; fevers; immunisation lot
The internal combustion engine; aeroplanes ; rockets 101
Electricity; wireless 102
Atomic fission 103
Secrecy imposed on scientists by war 103
Metallurgy 104-5
Plastics; artificial fibres; atmospheric nitrogen; dyestuffs 105
Advances in food production and preservation 106
Other technological advances 106-7
Alliance between science and technology 107
Scientific education 107-9
Development in research 109-10
Exchange of knowledge 110-n
CHAPTER V
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY 1900-1912
By J. P. T. Bury, Fellow of Corpus Christi College and
Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge
The Triple Alliance, and the Franco-Russian Alliance 112
Far East: China and Japan 1 13
Boxer risings (1900) 114
Near East: Turkey and Germany 115
Clash between Great Britain and France in Egypt 1 17
South Africa: the Boer War (1899-1902) 118-19
Expansion of the U.S. A 119
Growth of armaments 120
France and Russia, and Italy 120-1
Failure of attempts at rapprochement between Great Britain and Germany , . 122-4
Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) 124
Russia and Japan in the Far East 125
Anglo-French Entente (1904) 127
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CONTENTS
First Moroccan crisis: Tangier (1905) page 128-9
Germany and France, and Russia 129-30
Algeciras Conference (1906) 130-1
Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) 131-2
Events leading to the Balkan crisis 132-3
Effects of annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1908) 133-4
Germany’s naval programme and propaganda 136-7
Second Moroccan crisis: Agadir (1909) 137-8
Strengthening of Anglo-French Entente 139
Italy and Tripoli (1911) 139
CHAPTER VI
THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF 1914
By J. M. K. Vyvyan, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
‘First world war’ not world-wide 140
Remote and immediate origins 140
German reaction to Moroccan agreement 141
Abortive Anglo-German naval talks 141
Redisposition of the British and French fleets 143
France, Russia and the Balkans 143-4
Austro-German relations in the Balkan crisis 144
The Balkan War (1912) 145
Tension between Austria and Serbia: Albania 145-6
Peace Conference in London (1912) 146-7
Scutari episode (1913) 147
Treaty of Bucharest (1913) 148
Austria, the Balkans and Germany 149
Compromise on German military mission to Turkey 149-50
Russian rearmament 150
French military service law 151
Anglo-German negotiations on extra-European issues 151
Stabilisation in Near East and Africa 151
Habsburg Empire ripe for dissolution 152
German military dominance 152
Sarajevo (28 June 1914) 153
Austrian policy approved by Kaiser 154
‘Levity rather than a grand design’ 155
Preparation of Austrian note to Serbia 155
Germany’s blind eye 156
Franco-Russian policy; Great Britain; Germany 157-9
Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (23 July) 160
Partial mobilisation in Russia (25 July) 1 61
British proposal for a conference rejected by Germany 161
British warnings 163
Lack of co-ordination in Berlin 164
General mobilisation in Russia the decisive calamity (30 July) . . . . 165
British public unaware of possible results; breach of Belgian neutrality by Germany
(4 August) the crucial factor 166-8
Britain guarantees the northern coasts 168
Neutrality of Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey 169
A ‘scrap of paper’ . 169
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
By Brian Bond, Lecturer in War Studies , King's College,
University of London
Warnings ignored page 171
General staffs take charge; Germany well organised 17 1-2
Inferior quality of Austro-Hungarian army 172
French manpower ill-equipped and poorly used 172-3
Marginal role of British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) 173
Central powers hold aloof 1 73
Germany’s need for a quick decision in the west 1-73-4
Disruption of French plans 174
Liege and Mons 1 74-5
Failure of the Schlieffen plan 175
The Marne (Sept. 1914) 175-6
Trench warfare stabilised 176
Initial Russian success turned to failure 176-7
Naval strategy 177-8
Submarine warfare 178
The German colonies 178-9
Air warfare 179
Germany on the defensive in the west 179-80
Small gains in trench warfare; poison gas 180-1
Heavy casualties among Allies 181
West v. East controversy 181-2
Dardanelles (March 1915) 182-3
Undue deference to generals 183-4
The demands of total warfare 184
Shell shortage and problems of manpower 185
Italian bargaining 186
Defeat of Serbia (1915) 187
Mesopotamia (1916) 187
German offensive in the west; Verdun (Spring 1916) 187-8
Russian failure 188-9
The Somme battles (Feb.-Nov. 1916) 189-90
First use of tanks >9°
Leadership 191
Jutland (31 May 1916) 191-2
Rumania defeated 192-3
Lloyd George 193
Allied offensive planned for 1917 193-4
Peace feelers 194
Nivelle’s failure (1917) 194-5
Mutinies in French army 195
Passchendaele (July-Nov. 1917) 196-7
Statistics of casualties 197-8
Effects of Russian Revolution 199
Critical submarine menace; the convoy system 200
Italian crisis; Caporetto (Oct. 1917) • • • • • • • • • 200
Renewed German offensive in spring of 1918 200-2
Foch, Supreme Commander (March 1918) 202
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Arrival of U.S. troops (June 1918)
. page 202-3
Defeatism in the German army
203
Allied advance in August 1918
. 203-4
Germany sues for an armistice (3 Oct. 1918) ....
204
Causes of German defeat
• 204-5
A struggle of attrition
205
New means of mobility
206
Spread of nationalism
206-7
Propaganda
207
CHAPTER VIII
THE PEACE SETTLEMENT OF VERSAILLES
1918-1933
By Rohan Butler, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Armistice, n Nov. 1918 209
President Wilson’s ‘fourteen points’ 209
Reservations in authoritative commentary 210
Isolationsim and idealism in the U.S. A 21 1
Peace Conference subject to pressure of current events 212
Food shortages; blockade of Germany 213
Problems of new nationalities 214
French claims on Rhineland 215
Draft treaty submitted to unconsulted Germans 215-16
Some British modifications 217
Reparations and war indemnities 217-19
The Germans sign (28 June 1919) 219
Main provisions of the treaty 219-21
German resentment 221-2
Treaties with Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary 222
The new map of Europe 222
Central Europe balkanised 223
Self-determination 223-4
An uneasy western alliance 224-5
Italian grievances . 225
The U.S.A. refuses to sign the treaty 226
French security jeopardised ... 226-7
Greek expedition to Smyrna (May 1919) 228
Near East: British and French at odds ... .... 228
Turkey; Mustafa Kemal 228
Divergence between Britain and France 229-30
Allied debts 230-1
Occupation of Ruhr (1922) 231-2
Reparations; Dawes plan (1923) 232-3
Locarno Treaty (1925); Germany enters League of Nations .... 233-4
Kellogg Pact (1928) 234
German evasion of military limitations 234-6
Stresemann’s policy 236-8
Disarmament : a moral obligation 238
Naval agreements (1921-2) 238-9
Preparatory Commission on disarmament 239
Economic blizzard 239-40
Settlement undermined 241
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER IX
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
By the late J. L. Brierly, Professor of International Law in the
University of Oxford ; revised and rewritten by P. A. Reynolds,
Professor of Politics, University of Lancaster
Covenant of League part of peace treaties
page 242
Constitution: Assembly and Council; unanimity rule .
243
An international secretariat created
244
Permanent Court of International Justice; the optional clause .
244
Purpose of the League: international peace and security
245
Serious effect of the absence of the U.S.A
246
Disarmament: Temporary Mixed Commission ....
247
The Geneva Protocol (1924)
248-50
Locarno Treaty (1925)
250
Germany admitted to the League (1926)
251
Kellogg Pact (1928)
252
Disarmament Conference fixed for February 1932
253
Germany withdraws from the Conference
253
The U.S.S.R. admitted to membership (1934) ....
253
Disputes: Aaland Islands, Vilna, Corfu
254-5
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931) . .
256
China’s appeal to the League
256-7
Lytton Commission censures Japan; Japan gives notice of withdrawal
257
Other disputes : Bolivia and Paraguay, Colombia and Peru .
257-8
Italy’s attack on Abyssinia (Ethiopia)
258
League’s dilatory proceedings ineffective
258
Italy gives notice of withdrawal (1937)
260
The U.S.S.R. expelled after attack on Finland (1939) •
260
Helplessness in face of German aggression on Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland
260
The International Labour Organisation
261
Communications and transit
26l
Rehabilitation of Austrian finances
262
World Economic Conferences (1927, 1933)
262-3
Health Organisation; refugees; Central Opium Board .
263-4
Intellectual Co-operation
264
League’s inadequate financial resources
264
Studies of particular problems
264-5
Mandates Commission; minorities
265-6
Danzig; the Saar Basin
266-7
League superseded by the United Nations (1946)
268
CHAPTER X
THE MIDDLE EAST 1900-1945
ByE. Kedourie, Professor of Politics in the London School
of Economics, University of London
Traditional Muslim society and European society 269
European techniques strengthened absolutism in Ottoman Empire . . . 269
Young Ottomans forced a constitutional change (1876) 270
Centralisation made coup d'etat easier 271
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Young Turk Revolution (1908) page 271
The ‘Saviour Officers’ and the rise of Enver Bey 271-2
Iran an old-fashioned oriental despotism 273
Rivalry between Great Britain and Russia . 273
The tobacco protest (1891-2) 273-5
Murder of Nasir al-Din Shah (1896) 275
Promised reforms not carried out 276-7
Fundamental Laws (1906, 1907) 278
Muhammad Ali Shah abolishes the Constitution 279
Continued Russian pressure 280
Riza Khan proclaims himself Shah (1925) 280-1
Egypt under British control 281
Egyptian independence recognised (Feb. 1922); the Wafd 281-2
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) 283
Constitutionalism in Iraq a fiasco 283-4
British mandate; King Faisal 284
French conquest of Algeria 285
Treaty of Ouchy (1912); Tripoli ceded to Italy 285
Treaty of Fez (1912); French protectorate over Morocco 285
Nationalist aspirations after second world war 286
Great Britain, France and Russia and the Ottoman Empire .... 287
Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916); the Treaty of London (1915) ; Agreement of St Jean
de Maurienne (1917) 287
Complications resulting from these and other understandings .... 288
The Balfour Declaration (1917), an ambiguous document 289
Long drawn-out negotiations between France and Great Britain . . 289-90
Greeks in Smyrna (1919) 290
Rise of Mustafa Kemal; Treaty of Lausanne (1922) 290-1
Sultanate and caliphate abolished (1924) 291
French mandates over Syria and the Lebanon 292
British mandates over Mesopotamia and Palestine 293
Iraq enters the League of Nations (1932) 294
Problems of Palestine mandate 294
Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany 295
British and French in Syria 296
League of Arab States 296
CHAPTER XI
INDIA AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
I. India, by Percival Spear, Fellow of Selwyn College and Lecturer
in History in the University of Cambridge
2. South-East Asia, by D. G. E. Hall, formerly Professor of the History
of South-East Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
I. INDIA
Cultural as well as political and economic issues 297
Curzon as viceroy; the partition of Bengal 297-8
Morley-Minto reforms and the easing of tension 298
Industrial and cultural stirrings 299
Impact of the first world war, of the Russian Revolution and of the ‘fourteen
points’ 299-300
Government of India Act (1921) 300
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India a member of the League of Nations page 300
Influence of M. K. Gandhi after Amritsar 3° J
Non-violence; Gandhi’s ‘nationalised nationalism’ 3° 2
The younger leaders of Congress 302-3
Simon Commission (1927) 303
Round Table Conferences (1930-1) 3°3~4
Re-emergence of Congress; rift between Muslims and nationalists . . . 3°4
Government of India Act (1935); the attitude of the princes .... 304-5
Gandhi and Congress 306
The Muslim League as a mass movement 306-7
Expansion in education and culture 307-8
Eastern and Western concepts 308
Detached attitude to second world war 308-9
Effects of war on Indian life and economy 309-10
Deadlock between Congress and Muslim League 310
Effect of Japanese threat 3 1 1
Lord Wavell as viceroy 3 11-12
Lord Mountbatten and independence (14 Aug. 1946) 3 12
2. SOUTH-EAST ASIA
The Dutch, British and French empires 313-14
Siam: nationalism and traditionalism 3!5 -1 6
The Philippines under the U.S.A. . 3 1 7
Alarm at invasion of China by Japan 318
Early Dutch indifference to native institutions in Indonesia . . . . 3 1 ®
Indonesian nationalism; revolt of 1926 suppressed 3'9
Chinese and Indian immigrants 3 2 °
Malayan patriotism 3 2 °
The Federated States and the Straits Settlements 3 2 °
Burma quiescent for a long period; dyarchy introduced 321-2
Anti-Indian movement; demand for self-government 3 22
French Indo-China; the Vietnamese nationalist movement 3 22- 3
Japanese fail to win co-operation 3 2 4
Declaration of republics of Vietnam and Indonesia 3 2 5
Independence of Union of Burma (1948) 3 2 ^
Malaya independent within the British Commonwealth (1957) .... 326
Singapore gains self-government (1959) 326-7
The Philippines granted independence (1946) 3 2 7
Agreement between Netherlands and Indonesia 3 2 7
Vietnam’s struggle against France 3 2 7
Vietnam partitioned (1955) 3 2 8
CHAPTER XII
CHINA, JAPAN AND THE PACIFIC 1900-1931
By J. W. Davidson, Professor of Pacific History in the Australian
National University, and Colin Forster, Reader in
Economic History in the Australian National University
The Far East and Western Imperialism 329
Rise of Japan 3 2 9 - 3°
Drastic reorganisation of the state . 330-1
Industrialisation; foreign trade 33 1-2
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Extra-territoriality abolished (1899) page 332
China: a cumbrous government and a dynastic decline 332-3
Britain exacts concessions 333
Sino-Japanese war (1894) 333
Rivalry between Western powers 334-5
The Boxer Rebellion (1900) 335
Russia and Manchuria 336
Japan and Korea 336
Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) 336-7
Attempted rapprochement between Japan and Russia 338
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) 338-9
Japan annexes Korea and covets Manchuria 339-40
The weakness of China; autonomy of provincial governments .... 340
Sun Yat-sen; the republic; Yuan Shih-k'ai . 341-2
Effects of first world war 342-3
German ports and islands 342-4
Japan’s Twenty-one Demands (1915) 344-5
Chinese capitulation 345
Death of Yuan (1916) and subsequent political disorder 346
The U.S.A. and Allies and China during the war 346
China declares war on Germany 347
The U.S.A. recognises Japan’s ‘paramount interest’ in China .... 347-8
Impact of Russian Revolution 348
Allies support Russian anti-revolutionary forces 349
Decline of French and British influence in the Pacific 349
Peace Conference (1919): mandates 350-1
Chinese put their case before the Conference 351-2
Japan’s demands granted except for claim to racial equality .... 352-3
Washington naval talks; Anglo-Japanese Alliance not renewed .... 353-6
China and Japan 356-7
Great expansion of Japanese economy 357-60
The Japanese empire; Formosa and Korea 360
Effect of Great Depression 361
China as a field for foreign investment; the ‘open door’ 361-3
Tariff conference in Peking (1925) fails owing to deterioration of conditions in
China 365
Russia settles differences with China 365
Spread of Communist ideas 366
Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking .... 366-7
Growing anti-British feeling; increase in U.S. influence 367
Nationalists in Peking 369
The Manchurian question 369-70
Japan recognises new regime in China 370
Renewal of civil war in China 371
Japan seizes Mukden (1931) 371
Military dominance in Japan 371
Japanese invasion of China (1937), a major cause of the second world war . 372
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CHAPTER XIII
THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
By J. C. Beaglehole, Emeritus Professor of British Commonwealth
History, The Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Unpopularity of the British Empire at the turn of the century .
page 373
Changes in Victorian conception of empire
374
Differences in status and powers
375-6
Aversion to the word ‘empire’
376
Semi-British societies
377
Racial problems in Canada and South Africa ....
• 377-8
Economic and industrial expansion
378
End of suggested imperial federation
379
Demand for consultation
• 379-80
Effect of first world war; Dominion Prime Ministers and the Peace Conference
380-1
The problem of Ireland
• 38i-3
Dominions act independently
. 383-4
Constitutional crisis in Canada (1925)
.
.
384
‘Autonomous communities’
.
.
385
Precise definition avoided; conflicting interpretations; Statute of Westminster
(1931)
. 386-8
Each Dominion building its own diplomatic pattern .
389
Ottawa Conference (1932)
. 389-90
The Dominions and the League of Nations ....
390
Independent declarations in second world war ....
390
Ireland’s neutrality
391
Canberra pact between Australia and New Zealand (1944) .
392
Complicated history of the colonies since first world war .
393
The poverty of the colonial peoples
• 393-4
‘Dual mandate’, and ‘indirect rule’
. 394-6
Tendency to accept status quo
. 396-7
Contrasts in conditions of native peoples
. 397-8
Mandates
399
Between the wars
. 399-400
British grants for colonial projects
400-1
Constitutional development after 1945
401
India, Pakistan, Ceylon
401
Failure of federation in the West Indies
. 402
National self-government
. 402
CHAPTER XIV
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
By the late Isaac Deutscher
Culmination of a long process 403
Comparison with the French and English Revolutions 403
Lack of real parliamentary institutions in tsarist Russia 404
Poverty and discontent of peasantry accentuated by disorganising effect of the
first world war 404-5
Industrial backwardness 405
Progressives alarmed at defeatist influences round the Tsar .... 406
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Assassination of Rasputin (Dec. 1916) page 407
Ever-increasing chaos 407
Elemental power of revolution not realised at first 407-8
Sequence of events, Feb.-March 1917 408-9
The provisional government and the Petrograd soviet 409-10
Government’s determination to continue the war 410
Soviets in close touch with popular moods 410-11
Soldiers’ deputies admitted to Petrograd soviet 41 1
Four phases of events between the abdication and the seizure of power by the
Bolsheviks 412-13
Cleavages between Mencheviks and Bolsheviks 413-14
Socialist Revolutionaries 415
The Petrograd soviet leaders 416
Attitudes towards the war 417
Clamour for reform in the countryside 418
Postponement of a constituent assembly 418-19
Arrival of Lenin (April 1917) and the demand for proletarian dictatorship . . 419-20
Shrewdness and elasticity of the Bolsheviks 421-2
Collapse of Russian offensive in the south-west 422
Temporary eclipse of Bolsheviks; flight of Lenin (July 1917) .... 422-3
Coalition under Kerensky and his clash with Kornilov 423-4
Germans capture Riga; momentous shift to left 424
Bolsheviks gain a majority in the Petrograd soviet 425
Kerensky convenes a Democratic Conference 425
Return of Lenin (Oct. 1917) 426
Insurrection under Trotsky 426-7
Revolutionary Military Committee 427
The October Revolution; Bolsheviks in control 427-8
Council of Peoples’ Commissars under Lenin 429
The Peace of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) 431
Civil war 432
Foundations of a single party system 432
CHAPTER XV
THE SOVIET UNION 1917-1939
By George Kennan, Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study , Princeton
Outstanding problems 433
Small support for Bolsheviks; danger to them of elections 433~4
Socialist Revolutionaries split 434
Elected Assembly suppressed 434
The problem of the war 434-5
Punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) 435
The peasantry; opposition to Communists; separatist tendencies . . . 436-7
Allied military intervention; extravagant expectations 437-41
Massacre of the Tsar and his family (July 1918) 442
Triumph of Communist forces 443
Soviet-Polish war (1920) 443
The Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic 444
Regime of terror 445
Relations with other countries 445
High degree of centralisation 446
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Drastic lowering of living standards; labour unrest page 447-8
Kronstadt mutiny (Feb. 1921) 448
New Economic Policy (NEP) 448
Famine (1921-2) .... 449
Rapid recovery; the kulak \ the NEP men 450-1
Death of Lenin (21 Jan. 1924) 451
Stalin as General Secretary of the Party 452
Suppression of Lenin’s political testament 453
The triumvirate against Trotsky 453
Stalin eliminates rivals 454
Foreign relations: the Rapallo Treaty (1922) 454
New constitution; Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) .... 455
Trotsky banished (1927) 455
Economic recovery 456
Relations with Germany, Great Britain and China 456-7
Propaganda trials (1928-33) 458
Goal of an industrial and military autarky 458
Collectivisation: an agrarian revolution 458-9
First Five-Year Plan (1929) 459
Liquidation of the kulaks 460
Intensive programme of industrial construction 461
Appalling conditions by 1932; famine 462
Death of Stalin’s wife (Nov. 1932) . 463
Two new factors : Nazis in Germany, Japanese in Manchuria .... 463-4
Change in foreign policy; Litvinov as Foreign Minister 464-5
Stalin’s reign of terror 465-7
The Spanish Civil War 467-8
Breakdown of negotiations with Britain and France 468
German-Soviet Pact (Aug. 1939) 468-9
Survey of Russian society and economy since the revolution .... 469-72
CHAPTER XVI
GERMANY, ITALY AND EASTERN EUROPE
By Elizabeth Wiskemann
Vitality of the German Empire 473
The Reichstag could criticise but not control 473-4
Tortuous character of Wilhelm II 474
Influence of the General Staff 474
Results of rapid industrialisation 474-5
Gulf between classes 475
Three million Poles alienated 476
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY I9OO-I9I4
Austria predominantly Slav 476-7
Government under the Emperor Francis Joseph 477
Magyar domination in Hungary 477-8
Austria-Hungary an anomaly in Europe 478
The great landed magnates 479
Effect of the annexation of Bosnia 480
THE BALKAN PENINSULA
Nationalist aspirations unsatisfied 480
Effect of Turkish regime 481
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Serbia the Slav centre page 481
Violent emotional clash between nationalities 481
The Balkan War (1912) 482
Italy 1900-1914
New social problems 482
Industrialisation of northern Italy 482-3
Moderate social reforms . 483
The State and the Vatican 483
Extreme poverty of the south 484
Demand for an aggressive foreign policy . 484
Italy’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary (May 1915) .... 484
THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Dream of a Great-German world power 485
Italian gains 485-6
Mussolini’s rise to power and the end of all freedoms 486-7
‘Stabbing the German army in the back’ 487
German minorities in the Austrian succession states 487-8
Spartakists and Communists in Germany 488
Locarno (1925) 488
Industry and poverty concentrated in Vienna 489
Czechoslovakia under Masaryk 489
Yugoslav Triune Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . . . 490
Landed magnates regain control in Hungary 490
The new Poland and its problems 490-1
The Baltic provinces 49 1
Turkish resurgence under Kemal 491
Breakdown of parliamentary government in Poland and Yugoslavia ... 491
THE GREAT DEPRESSION: HITLER BECOMES GERMAN CHANCELLOR
End of prosperity in Germany and the rise of Adolf Hitler 492
Collapse of Austrian finances 492
National Socialism in Germany 493-4
Hitler becomes Chancellor (Jan. 1933) and seizes full power .... 494-5
Spread of totalitarian ideas in Austria and Hungary 495-6
‘GLEICHSCHALTUNG’ IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
Suppression of liberties in Germany 496
Hitler’s aims ... 497
A ruthless police state 497
The Churches and Nazism 49*
Final break with pre-1914 ruling class 498
CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1929-1938
A satisfactory constitution 499
The Sudeten Germans 499-500
An approach to Russia ... 500
The German occupation of Austria (March 1938) 501
Czechoslovakia destroyed (March 1939) 501
The German Mitteleuropa 502
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THE ATTACK UPON POLAND EXPANDS INTO A SECOND WORLD WAR
Steel Pact between Germany and Italy page 502
Pogrom in Germany 503
Poland’s attempted appeasement of Germany 503
Lebensraum 504
Collapse of France 504
The Balkan peninsula subdued 504-5
Germany’s attack on Russia (June 1941) 505-6
Reign of terror extended ; the extermination of the Jews 506
Guerrilla warfare in the Balkans 507
North Africa, and Stalingrad 507
Industrial unrest in Italy; arrest of Mussolini (25 July 1943) .... 507-8
The Russian advance 508-9
Attempted assassination of Hitler (20 July 1944) 509
Allies invade France 509
Rumania and Bulgaria desert Germany . 510
The Poles and Hungarians revolt 510
The swan-song of east European aristocracy 51 1
CHAPTER XVII
GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, THE LOW COUNTRIES AND
SCANDINAVIA
By Maurice Crouzet, Inspecteur general del' Instruction publique,
Paris. Translated by K. Lloyd-Jones, Lecturer in French,
University College of North Wales, Bangor
The transformation of society 512
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM AND THE ORGANISATION OF SOCIETY
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY
Universal suffrage, but representation in the hands of the ruling class . . 513-14
Trade Unions and socialists 514
GOVERNMENT BY THE LIBERAL BOURGEOISIE: I9OO-I9I4
Political rather than social problems dominant 514
The Dreyfus affair (1899) 514-15
French parties and groupings 515
Social conservatism and revolutionary trade-unionism .... 516
Reawakened nationalism 517
Military service law 517-18
Social democratic parties in Scandinavia 518
Holland and Belgium 518-19
Problems of the Liberal government in Great Britain (1906) .... 519-20
Party truce at outbreak of first world war 521
Dissensions leading to virtual war-dictatorships 522-3
State controls and labour problems; the working-class movement . . . 523-4
Victory followed by disturbances 524-5
Conservative hegemony in Great Britain 525
Social and cultural advances 525
Bloc National Republicain in France . 525-6
Tripartite union in Belgium 526
The neutral countries 526-7
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THE INTER-WAR YEARS I 92 I-I 939
Post-war problems page 527
French attitude to Great Britain and Russia 527
Delays in dealing with economic and social problems in France .... 527-8
Transformation of the classes of society 528-9
New industrial bourgeoisie 529
Demands for an authoritarian regime in France 530
Political conditions in Great Britain and France compared 530-1
Weakness of European currencies 531
Labour government in Great Britain (1924) 531-2
The General Strike (1926) 532
Influence of banking interests in France 533
The Great Depression; policy in Great Britain 534
British Union of Fascists 536
Rearmament 536
Effects of Depression in Scandinavia and the Netherlands 537-8
Crisis of parliamentary system in France 539
Various movements; spread of totalitarian ideas; 6 Feb. 1934 .... 541-2
Front populaire 542
Rising hopes in the working class 542
Drift to the right; ruling class intent on revenge 543
Public opinion in disarray 544
Belgium as disturbed as France 544-5
THE SECOND WORLD WAR I 939 ~I 945
British economy strictly controlled 547
The Beveridge Report 547
Labour in power, 1945 547
Vichy France; an arbitrary regime 548
Collaboration and resistance 549-50
Sweden’s neutrality 550
Norway, Denmark and Holland occupied (Apr.-May 1940) .... 550-2
Occupation of Belgium less oppressive 552
Resistance in France 552-4
Socialist parties become reformist 555
CHAPTER XVIII
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
By Sir Denis Brogan, Emeritus Professor of Political Science
in the University of Cambridge
Theodore Roosevelt, President (1901-9). Republican 556-60
Panama 558-9
William Howard Taft, President (1909-13). Republican 560-1
Woodrow Wilson, President (19 1 3-21). Democrat 561-4
‘The New Freedom’ 561-2
Mexico 562
First world war 562-3
Republicans reject Treaty of Versailles 564
Warren Gamaliel Harding, President (1921-3). Republican .... 564-8
Ku-Klux-Klan; prohibition; corruption 566-8
Calvin Coolidge, President (1923-9). Republican 568-9
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‘The business of the United States is business’ page 570-1
Herbert Hoover, President (1929-33). Republican 571-3
The Great Depression 571-3
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President (1933-45). Democrat .... 573-82
The New Deal 574-8
Latin America 577
Unemployment insurance 577-8
The Supreme Court 578-9
Industrial unrest 579
Foreign relations; ‘cash and carry’; Lend-Lease 580-1
Pearl Harbour (7 Dec. 1941) 581
The United Nations 583
The changed position of the U.S.A 583
CHAPTER XIX
LATIN AMERICA
By J. H. Parry, Professor of Oceanic History , Harvard University
Political independence only; end of European interference 584
Pan-Americanism 584-5
Brazil; Argentina 585-6
Chile; Mexico 586-8
Dependence on exports 588
Latin-American Catholicism 589
Vigorous intellectual life 589-90
Progress in Argentina 590-1
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1 1) 591
Intervention by the U.S.A 592
Theodore Roosevelt’s policy 592-3
Dollar diplomacy 593-4
Growing importance of Latin America in world affairs 594 5
The first world war; the League of Nations 594-5
Economic effects of the war 595-6
Foreign investment 596
Chile’s economic plight 596-7
Argentine and Uruguayan beef industry 597
A period of peace and prosperity 597-8
Oil 598
Concern for welfare of labour 598-9
Constitutional radicalism 599-600
The Great Depression 601
A period of revolutions: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico 601-5
Urge towards economic independence 605-6
The Pan-American idea; ‘good neighbour’ policy 606-8
The second world war 608-9
Per6n in Argentina 610
Strengthening of constitutionalism 610-11
Decline in world trade 61 1
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CHAPTER XX
LITERATURE 1895-1939
By A, E. Dyson, Senior Lecturer in English Studies,
University of East Anglia
Significance of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure page 613
Henry James’s late novels 614-15
E. M. Forster; Rudyard Kipling; Joseph Conrad 615-19
Need for endurance; change and violence 619-20
Thomas Hardy as a poet 620-1
War poetry: Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen 621-2
The Georgians; the Imagists 623-4
What is ‘modem’? 625
Joyce’s Ulysses', Eliot’s The Waste Land 626-30
Scott Fitzgerald; Franz Kafka; D. H. Lawrence 630-2
Ironists 632-3
Poets of the 1930s 633-4
Graham Greene; George Orwell 634-5
Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw 635-8
Irish dramatists 638-9
American dramatists 639-40
The poetic drama 640
Lapis Lazuli 641-3
CHAPTER XXI
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
I. Philosophy, by Renford Bambrouoh, Fellow and Dean of St John's College
and Lecturer in Moral Science in the University of Cambridge
2. Religious Thought, by the Very Reverend W. R. Matthews, K.C.V.O.,
formerly Dean of St Paul’s
1. PHILOSOPHY
The philosophical situation at the turn of the century 644-6
English-speaking idealists 646
Principia Mathematica 646
Ludwig Wittgenstein 647-9
The Vienna Circle 649
Ayer’s phenomenalism 649-51
‘Linguistic’ philosophy 653
Neglect of historical studies in philosophy 653
Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy 655-6
Existentialism 656
2. RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
Naturalism 656
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud 657
Meaning in history 657-8
Nature in religion 658-9
The times not propitious for the discussion of religious ideas .... 659
Liberal Protestantism 659-60
Modernist movement 660
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Social gospel page 66 1
‘The historical Jesus’ 661-2
Restatement of orthodox doctrines 662
Mysticism 662-3
Barth’s theology of crisis 663
Russian and Eastern Orthodox writers 663-4
The Ecumenical movement 664
CHAPTER XXII
PAINTING, SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE
By M. E. Cooke, Senior Lecturer in History and the History of Art,
University College of North Wales, Bangor
PAINTING
A revolutionary art 665
Divisionism and symbolism 665
Fauvism; cubism; ‘Papier Colie’ 665-7
Futurism; expressionism; abstraction 668
Dada; surrealism 670-1
The German Bauhaus 671
‘Unit One’ 672
U.S.A.: the ‘Ash Can School’; ‘Action Painting’ 672-3
SCULPTURE
Recovery under Rodin 673
Futurist and surrealist sculpture 674
ARCHITECTURE
The influence of William Morris 675-6
Art Nouveau 676
Frank Lloyd Wright 676-7
Developments in Austria and Germany 677
Gropius 677-8
1919-23: a heyday of ideas 679-80
Le Corbusier 680-2
England and America 682
Scandinavia; Italy 683
Le Corbusier again 683
CHAPTER XXIII
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY 1930-1939
By D. C. Watt, Reader in International History in the
London School of Economics, University of London
Effect of economic crisis on political issues 684
Germany’s approach to Austria 685
Breakdown of international order in the Far East 685-6
France in search of allies 687
The World Disarmament Conference (1932) 687-8
German approach to France 688-9
Isolationism of the U.S.A 689
Collapse of World Economic Conference (1933) 6S9-90
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Hitler’s plans page 690
Crisis in Austria 691
Germany and Japan leave the League of Nations 691
British arms programme 692
Japan and China 692
German-Polish non-aggression pact 693
Failure of putsch by Austrian Nazis 694
Laval and Mussolini 694-5
The Stresa Conference (1935) 695-6
Franco-Soviet pact (1935) 696
Abyssinia (Ethiopia); sanctions against Italy 696-8
The Hoare-Laval understanding 698
Smaller nations disturbed 699
Turkey at Montreux Conference (1936) 700
Belgium to be ‘exclusively Belgian’ 7°°
U.S. A. : Neutrality Act (1937) 700-1
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ between Great Britain and Italy 701
The established order of the 1920s shattered 701-2
Japan and China 702-3
Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 703-4
Civil War in Spain; reactions of powers 704-6
Hitler’s attitude to Great Britain 706-7
Neville Chamberlain’s policy 707-8
European position at the end of October 1937 709
United front in China 709-10
President Roosevelt’s ‘quarantine’ speech 710-11
The U.S. A., Great Britain and China 7 > 1-12
British hopes for a settlement 712—13
Another Austrian crisis 714
Anschluss by force (March 1938) 715
The Sudeten German problem 715-16
Russian proposals 716-17
Threats to Czechoslovakia 7*7— 1 8
Sudeten settlement impossible 718-19
Renewed Russian efforts 719-20
Meetings between Chamberlain and Hitler at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg
(15 and 22 Sept. 1938) 720-1
The Munich Conference (29 Sept. 1938), and its effects 722-3
Polish and Hungarian reactions 723
End of Spanish Civil War (Jan. 1939) 724
Collapse of negotiations between China and Japan 724-5
German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia (March 1939) .... 72.5-6
Danzig and the Corridor 726
Hitler disconcerted by British reaction to Munich 727
War-nerves 728-9
Failure of moves for collective action 729
Italy invades Albania (April 1939) 729
Change in Russian policy 73°
The ‘Pact of Steel’ (May 1939) 731
Abortive British-Russian negotiations 73 1
Nazi-Soviet pact (23 Aug. 1939) 733-4
War 734
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXIV
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Sir Basil Liddell Hart
Failure between the wars to appreciate role of mechanical power
Tank-cum-air theory accepted in Germany and Russia
Out-dated attitude of cavalry men ....
Reluctance of Britain to mechanise ....
Germany able to build a small army of high quality and mobility
Failure to check Hitler in the Rhineland
Austria and Czechoslovakia
The German blitz on Poland
The Phoney War
Germany moves into Norway and Denmark
Germany attacks France ....
Dunkirk (26 May-4 June 1940) .
France forced to ask for armistice (21 June 1940)
Britain’s perilous position ...
Why did Hitler halt? ....
Extension of war to the Mediterranean
Wavell’s success in North Africa .
Fatal Greek diversion ....
Rommel’s successes ....
Far East defences neglected
German invasion of Russia (22 June 1941)
German repulse at Moscow
Reasons for the German failure in Russia
Stalingrad (Feb. 1943)
Japanese successes ....
British retreat in North Africa; Tobruk (June 1942)
First battle of Alamein the turning point .
British advance and Anglo-American landing in
Defeat of German-Italian army in Africa .
Sicily and the Italian campaign .
Allied armies land in Normandy (6 June 1944)
Russian offensive maintained
End of war in Europe (8 May 1945) .
End of war in Far East (8 Sept. 1945) .
The atomic bomb: was its use justified?
Superior industrial power and material resources with sea power brought victory
Comments on strategy
North Africa (Nov. 1942)
page 735-6
737
737-8
738
739
740-1
741
742-4
745
746-9
749-52
753-4
755-7
757- 8
758- 9
759
759-61
761-4
764-5
765
766-8
768
769
770
771-5
776-8
• 779
779-82
782-4
785
785-8
789
790
791- 2
792- 3
794
794-7
CHAPTER XXV
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Sir Llewelyn Woodward, formerly Professor of Modern
History in the University of Oxford and Professor in the
Institute for Advanced Study , Princeton
Hitler exaggerated faults of earlier regimes 798
His dealings with Italy, Japan, Russia and Vichy France 798-9
The ‘New Order’ . . 799-800
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Soviet suspicions of its Allies page 800-1
U.S. policy of non-involvement before 1942 801-2
‘Lend-Lease’ . . 803
Difficulties of an agreed diplomatic policy 803-4
Economic warfare 804-5
The U.S.A., Great Britain and Vichy France 805-6
British and U.S. policy in the Far East 808-9
Russia and the future of Poland 810-11
The Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations . . 811-12
Unconditional surrender 813
Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam 814-15
The United Nations 815-17
Polish problem a test between Russia and Western powers 817-18
Disunity? 818
Index 819
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material in chapter xx: the Trustees of the Hardy Estate, Macmillan and
Co. Ltd, the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd and Crowell-Collier and
Macmillan Inc. for ‘The Shadow on the Stone ’ from The Collected Poems
of Thomas Hardy, Mr Harold Owen, Chatto and Windus Ltd, and New
Directions Inc., New York, for ‘Futility’ from The Collected Poems of
Wilfred Owen ; A. P. Watt and Son and Macmillan, New York, for lines
from ‘ The Song of the Happy Shepherd, ’ ‘ Easter 1916’ and ‘ Lapis Lazuli ’
from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats ; Faber and Faber and Random
House Inc., for lines from ‘ Spain 1937 ’ by W- H. Auden, and Faber and
Faber and Harcourt Brace and World for lines from ‘ The Waste Land ’ by
T. S. Eliot.
xxvii
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY SURVEY: ON THE LIMITS
OF MODERN HISTORY
W hen Lord Acton was planning The Cambridge Modern History
in 1896 he wrote of the venture:
It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the
greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is
about to bequeath. . .
Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conven-
tional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other,
now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of
solution.
Acton projected the History as a work of universal history, ‘distinct from
the combined history of all countries’.
It moves in a succession to which the nations are subordinate. Their story will be
told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series,
according to the time and degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes
of mankind. 1
Few historians today have Acton’s confidence that universal history
or ultimate history can yet be written. Indeed, Sir George Clark, in his
‘General Introduction’ to the New Cambridge Modern History, disclaimed
for historians of his generation the belief that it would be possible to
write ‘definitive history’. ‘This new issue of the Cambridge Modern
History has been planned neither as a stepping-stone to definitive history,
nor as an abstract or a scale-reduction of all our knowledge of the period,
but as a coherent body of judgments true to the facts.’ 2 Its scope remained
that of the original series: ‘the history of that “civilisation” which,
from the fifteenth century, spread from its original European homes,
assimilating extraneous elements as it expanded, until it was more or less
firmly planted in all parts of the world’. 3
The last volume in the New Cambridge Modern History must necessarily
begin by taking stock not only of the period with which it is concerned
but with its place in the series or, rather, its place in ‘ modern history’. This
was less essential for the editors of the last volume of the Cambridge
Modern History. Published in 1910, and covering the period from 1870 to
1910, it was sufficient to call it ‘The Latest Age’ and to assume that it
marked no end of an epoch, no real terminus. Its authors were spared the
1 The Cambridge Modern History: Its Origin, Authorship and Production (Cambridge,
1907), pp. IO-14, quoted in E. H. Carr, What is History? (Cambridge, 1961), pp. I, 145.
* The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1 (1957), P- xxxiv ; cf. p. xxiv. 8 Ibid. p. xxxv.
I
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
knowledge that the first world war of modern history and of the twentieth
century was only four years away, and that the continuity of the ‘modem
history’ with which the twelve volumes had been concerned could not in
future be taken for granted. None the less, their volume was far from
being centred on Europe; its chapters included surveys of Egypt and the
Sudan, the Far East, the British Empire in India, Japan, Latin America,
the European Colonies, and a chapter on The Scientific Age.
The present volume virtually begins where its predecessor of 1 9 1 o ended,
though several of its chapters go back to the beginning of the century. It
ends in 1945, at a far greater distance from the time of its writing than was
true of the earlier volume, which was for its latter stages practically
contemporary history. In this volume some of the chapters refer perforce
to events which have occurred after 1945. In all of them, whatever the
nominal limits, the knowledge of the history of the world since 1945 has
inevitably had its influence. How we view the period 1900-45 as a whole
or in its parts is bound to be affected by our interpretation of the history
of the last twenty years.
What, then, should be the theme of this volume, from the vantage-
ground of 1966? The original edition was published in 1960, and reflected
in its planning and its theme the spirit of the 1950s if not of the immediate
post-war years after 1945. It was natural to entitle it ‘The Era of Violence’.
And no one would deny that violence characterised a great deal of the
history it recorded — more so, perhaps, than in any earlier period of
history, at least if the degree of violence and brutality, and the numbers of
its victims, are reckoned in the balance.
As he surveys the twenty years or more since 1945, however, the
historian may feel that violence has not been the main characteristic of
this century. He notices the developments in the use of nuclear power for
peaceful purposes as well as for its destructive force. He notes the achieve-
ment of parity in the ability to attack between the United States of
America and Russia in 1957, and equally the first nuclear explosion in
China in 1965. The danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons has
become clearer; but the very fact of this shows the universality of scientific
and technical knowledge and discovery, and the need to recognise the
condition that we are all members one of another. The exploration of
space which has been proceeding seems to be competitive rather than co-
operative, though clearly each team learns much, even if at one remove,
from the work of the rival. Thus the launching of the first man-made
satellite by the Russians in 1957 was followed by several manned flights
of satellites of American and Russian manufacture in 1961.
Parallel with these developments were others transforming our view of
the twentieth-century world. One was the sudden recognition that the
world was in the midst of a ‘population explosion’ which was likely to
produce a population of 5,000 millions by 1986 and 50,000 millions (or one
2
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INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
person per square foot of the entire earth’s surface) by 2110. Since 1850
the world population of 1,000 millions had doubled by 1930, increased to
2,326 millions by 1947 and to 3,000 millions in 1962, and was expected to
reach 4,000 millions in 1977, a bare fifteen years later. The problems of
food supply, and the contrast between the poverty of the majority and the
well-fed affluence of a minority of the earth’s peoples, were becoming more
pressing. At the same time new fertilisers and pesticides and battery and
factory methods of rearing animals for food promised an increase in food
supplies while also threatening the balance of nature on which such
supplies might depend. Yet again, discoveries in biology and genetics and
contraceptives opened the way to limiting the increase of population, to
moulding the physical characteristics of future generations, and to
creating human beings by artificial means.
No less revolutionary were the other changes portended by new
advances in science and technology. The development of computers and
the process of automation promised to eliminate much routine work from
industry and commerce. Not too little leisure but too much seemed likely
to be the lot of ordinary men and women. Similarly, commercial aviation
on the main routes across the oceans and between the continents only
came into its own after 1945; diplomacy, business, tourism were much
changed by the new speed of travel, measured in hours instead of days or
weeks, and the apparent shrinkage of distances.
In these years (1945-65) world politics and the relations between
countries and continents responded, though slowly, to the changes being
made by science and technology. Power politics became polarised round
two super-powers, the United States and Russia, who for long engaged in
the rivalry of the ‘Cold War’. The growth in power and influence and
scientific mastery of the Chinese Republic since the middle ’fifties began
to intrude upon this over-simple ‘balance of power’. The recovery of
western Europe, particularly of France and Germany and the other
members of the Common Market (1957), raised up another, though lesser,
force in world affairs. Other challengers of the old order were the newly
independent countries of Asia and Africa and the Middle East which had
risen from colonial status: first India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon in
1947; Ghana (1957), followed by the other British colonies in Africa; the
overseas territories and colonies of France, Italy, Belgium and the
Netherlands. From the first the new nations insisted on being treated on a
level of complete equality with the old — a claim which Egypt vindicated
by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and by its resistance to the at-
tempted Anglo-French invasion in 1956. The new nations came to con-
stitute a majority in the United Nations. The rivalry between the white
and coloured peoples, whether within a nation (as in the ‘civil rights’
campaigns in the United States in the 1960s) or between the nations,
assumed a new dimension.
3 3 NCM 12
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
It is these circumstances which have forced historians to examine the
whole nature of change in this century and to ask whether a new stage or
a new epoch has been reached which demands a new kind of history and a
new name. The editor of the first edition of this volume finds a ‘more
coherent and precise concept of world history’ both possible and desirable
in this century because for the first time ‘ the six continents of the world
really matter to one another’. Interdependence and interaction provide
‘the central theme of world history during the last fifty years ’. 1 Another
historian talks of ‘the shifting balance of power between continents,
nations and classes, through which we are living’.
The middle years of the twentieth century find the world in a process of change
probably more profound and more sweeping than any which has overtaken it since
the mediaeval world broke up in ruins and the foundations of the modem world were
laid in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. . .This transition to what I have called
the contemporary world... is not yet complete: it is part of the revolutionary
change through which the twentieth-century world is passing... It is only today
that it has become possible for the first time even to imagine a whole world consisting
of peoples who have in the fullest sense entered into history. . . 2
Similar reflections have led another historian to the conviction that
‘modem history’ has ended, and that recent or contemporary history
cannot be thought of simply as the latest phase of modem history (the
period of European history beginning with the Renaissance and the
Reformation). ‘Contemporary history is different, in quality and content,
from what we know as “modem” history.’
One of the distinctive facts about contemporary history is that it is world history and
that the forces shaping it cannot be understood unless we are prepared to adopt
world-wide perspectives ; and this means not merely supplementing our conventional
view of the recent past by adding a few chapters on extra-European affairs, but
re-examining and revising the whole structure of assumptions and preconceptions on
which that view is based.
The first half of the twentieth century has all the marks of a ‘ period of
revolutionary change and crisis’ comparable to the ‘social and intellectual
upheaval at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’ and to the
period of the Renaissance and Reformation, one of the ‘moments when
humanity swings out of its old paths on to a new plane, when it leaves the
marked-out route and turns off in a new direction ’. 3
With the problem of terminology here raised — what to call the new
age of history — we need not be concerned. But the larger argument poses
the question to what age of history the first half of the twentieth century
1 David Thomson, World History from 1914 to 19 so (Home University Library: Oxford,
1954 ). PP- 4 - 6 .
2 E. H. Carr, What is History?, pp. 112, 128, 135, 144.
8 Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London, 1 964), pp. 2, 4.
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INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
belongs. Is it, as Barraclough contends, the ‘watershed’ between ‘modem’
and ‘contemporary’ history, a watershed extending from 1890, when
Bismarck retired, to 1961, when President John F. Kennedy began his
term of office? Does it mark the end of a chapter, or the beginning of a
new chapter, or a time of transition partaking of two eras, old and new?
To raise such questions is not to answer them. To define twentieth-
century history as contemporary history, world history in a new sense, is
not to write it; old habits of mind, old boundaries, persist, not least among
historians. This volume can only hope to provide some of the materials
for a judgement of the character of its period.
Of those forces making for a new kind of world and a new world
history four at least were manifest in the opening years, before 1914. The
‘dwarfing of Europe’ and the power of nationalism outside Europe was
foreshadowed at the beginning of the century by Japan’s victory over
Russia, an Asian nation defeating a European, ‘a first glimpse of the
future global age’. 1 This gave warning that the fate of Asia, and par-
ticularly of China, was not to be decided by the European powers. The
creation of the Republic of China in 1912 was another portent, its
significance masked for a generation by the civil wars and internal weak-
ness which ensued (ch. xu). In Europe, the events of chief importance in
the long run were not the rivalry of the Great Powers in the Balkans nor
the diplomatic crises of 1905 and 19 1 1 nor the competition in armaments,
especially between Britain and Germany over naval strength; rather they
were social, technological, scientific. It was not that society was trans-
formed, but the assumptions which governed it were changing. There was
greater class-consciousness, a sharper edge to industrial unrest, a stronger
demand for more equality. The birth of the Labour party, the attack on
the House of Lords, the legislation for social welfare (1908-1 1) were signs
of a new temper and the efforts of government to placate it in Britain;
and it was in 1911 also that the Bismarckian edifice of social security
in Germany was completed. The technological and industrial changes
were more gradual, and those affecting everyday living — refrigeration,
canning, electricity, the telephone, the motor car — all had their begin-
nings in the late nineteenth century; as did the trusts and monopolistic
corporations. The twentieth century opened, however, with two triumphs
of invention fraught with global consequences : Marconi’s transmission
of wireless signals across the Atlantic in 1901, and Bleriot’s flight across
the English Channel in 1909 (more significant, perhaps, than the Wright
brothers’ pioneer flight in an aeroplane in 1903).
It was, however, the scientists who even then ‘had the future in their
bones’ (ch. rv). Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896, J. J.
Thomson’s discovery of the electron in 1897, Rutherford’s demonstration
in 1911 that the ‘rays’ emitted in radioactive disintegration were really
1 Ibid. p. 101.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
atoms, and equally the theorems of Planck and Einstein, pointed not
merely to the transformation of physics but to the later exploitation of
nuclear power. Here was a ‘long revolution’, continuing largely out of
public sight between the wars, to its demonic revelation in 1945. Equally
gradual was the advance of genetics, building on Mendel’s forgotten work.
The discovery of drugs to resist or cure disease was more dramatic:
Ronald Ross and Walter Reed showed at the beginning of the century how
malaria and yellow fever could be controlled — ‘ western’ scientists helping
to transform the lives of millions in other continents. Ehrlich’s discovery of
salvarsan in 1909 was only one of a series, marked by the development of
the sulfa drugs in 1935-8 and penicillin in 1940. All of this contributed to
and rested on the growth of the scientific profession (itself an aspect of the
rise of the professions which the nineteenth century had witnessed). The
danger, coming from the steady and now commonplace manifestations of
scientific progress, is that the giant weight and permeative force of science
as an agent of change is too easily discounted, particularly over a period
such as this, which was the seed-time for later harvests. Even the voice of
the historian of science seems deceptively low-pitched :
The first half of the twentieth century proved to be a period of advance in science
surpassing that of all preceding times in extent, in rapidity and in application ; and in
these fifty years the harvest of four centuries of modem science was reaped so
thoroughly that it changed the whole aspect and outlook of our civilisation as well
as our daily lives and our habits of thought. 1
Into this world, barely disturbed by the first tremors of the changes to
come, erupted the first of the two world wars of the half-century. Perhaps
the first world war does not deserve its name; it was a European civil war
with some fighting in side-shows outside Europe and it brought the
United States into Europe as a belligerent. The older term, the Great War,
puts it in its European context: the losses it inflicted, in blood and
treasure, were far greater than those of any previous war. It was not,
however, the human and material losses in Europe that made it significant
in shaping the new world history. Rather, it was the succession of shocks
and blows which it inflicted. Part of these were psychological. The war
followed a century of general peace and of European hegemony, of
growing international trade and of massive emigration from Europe. A
world system of investment, credit and trade had seemed part of the
permanent order of things, in which Great Britain was ‘the conductor of
the orchestra ’ (ch. m). Now the European states had weakened themselves
and the old structure had disintegrated. The Austrian, German, Ottoman
and Czarist empires were no more; in the quarter-century of King
George V’s reign (1910-36) five emperors and eight kings lost their
thrones. The Russian Revolution might well prove the beginning of a
1 See below, ch. iv, p. 88.
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world revolution: the demonstration of communism in action, and the
force of its example and propaganda, struck fear into the ruling classes
and spread hope in much of the working class.
In all this the dwarfing of Europe had begun; its position of world
leadership was undermined. The spirit of nationalism had been given new
potency, particularly in India and in the Islamic world. Old patterns of
trade and industry had been broken: new competitors appeared against
the old suppliers, as Britain, in particular, found when her coal exports
were displaced in Europe and her markets for cotton goods in India and
Africa were invaded by the Japanese. The war had mobilised industry;
but the expansion only left the contestants with surplus capacity. The war
led to increased production of foodstuffs; at the end there was an ap-
parent glut, and the slump in world prices held back the countries of
primary production for a decade and delayed the recovery of world
trade. True the interdependence which for centuries had made a world
economy in trade a reality was not lost amid the movement towards
higher tariffs and autarky; and planning, a feature of totalitarian,
communist and democratic states alike, offered some hope of a better
world order and a fairer use of the world’s resources in some distant
future (ch. m).
The more obvious legacy of the war was the ‘great depression’ of the
early ’thirties and the rise of dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Spain,
Portugal and several other countries (ch. xvi). Depression sapped the
cohesion and the instinct for preservation in countries which remained
democratic; in France and Belgium, and to a less extent in Britain, demo-
cratic government itself was under attack (ch. xvn). In Germany it gave
an entry to Hitler and the Nazis to seize power and erect their totalitarian
and militarist Reich and begin an internal reign of terror. Hitler’s ambi-
tions, the more frightening because they seemed nebulous and unlimited,
were at least one of the causes of the second world war.
For a long time, however, the effect of the first world war in weakening
European dominance and opening the way to a new era of world history
was masked by the illusion of a return to the old order. International trade
and credit revived, though clogged by the new war debts and reparations :
the pound was restored to the gold standard at its pre-war parity with the
dollar in 1925 — a premature and unconvincing gesture. The League of
Nations (ch. ix) seemed not merely a substitute for the old ‘concert of
Europe’ but an improvement on it, world-wide but Europe-led. Soviet
Russia, beset by the problems of economic planning and revolutionary
social reconstruction (chs. in, xv), showed few signs of emerging as a new
world power. The United States, equally responsive to war-bom emotions
of nationalism, retreated from open commitment to the European balance
of power. On the other hand, the European overseas empires, swollen
by the absorption of Germany’s former colonies, were vaster and
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more impressive than ever; the British Empire had reached its greatest
extent, and the sun never set on its Government Houses round the
world.
Beneath the surface the European order was being eroded between the
wars. Imperialism was in retreat. Perhaps J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism
(1904) was the first blow to its twentieth-century self-assurance : or had the
Boer War already cast the first stone? The part played by the Dominions
in the war gave them new status as independent states, and the new name
for the British Empire, British Commonwealth of Nations, was not merely
symbolic. In India the Congress party drew up a declaration of independence
and Gandhi launched his civil disobedience campaign in 1919 (ch. xt, § 1),
though it took a quarter of a century and a second world war to bring
independence, and partition, to India. In the Middle East there were new
states made from parts of the old Turkish Empire : true, British and French
influence over them seemed secure, though Palestine’s early history foretold
the strength of Arab nationalism (ch. x). In Africa, the Caribbean and
South-East Asia the colonies of the European powers felt little of the wind
of change, though there were cautious efforts to bring educated natives into
a share in government (chs. xi, §2, xm). The French colonies continued to
be administered as permanent dependencies of metropolitan France, and
‘assimilation’ remained the goal. A policy very similar to Lugard’s ‘dual
mandate’ in the British colonies was expounded by M. Sarraut’s Mise
en valeur des colonies frangaises (1923), emphasising the association of the
native elite in the government, and economic development in the interests
of the indigenous people. In the Belgian Congo (the Congo Free State
ruled by Belgium after 1908) paternalistic administration and development
of mineral wealth went hand in hand. 1
How far the erosion of European power outside its own continent had
gone was most clearly shown by the actions of Japan. It was in 1915,
during the war, that Japan had presented its Twenty-One Demands on
China, a claim to dominate China and much of Asia. Circumstances
compelled a standstill; but Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was
simply the resumption of the former claim (ch. xii). Behind it lay the rapid
growth of population in the East, while Europe’s rate of increase slowed
down. Japan’s population doubled in the sixty years before 1930; India’s
grew by 83 million between 1920 and 1940; in Java and the Kiangsu
province of China the population density was over 800 per square mile
(in Europe it averaged 184). This was not a matter of a growing rural
population: in 1900 there were only 3 cities in Asia with over a million
people; by i960 there were 26 in the world’s total of 69. ‘It is no exaggera-
tion to state that the demographic revolution of the half-century between
1890 and 1940 was the basic change marking the transition from one era
1 Lord Hailey, An African Survey (rev. ed. Oxford, 1957), pp. 206 f.; R. Oliver and
J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa (London, 1962), pp. 210-1 1.
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INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
of history to another.’ 1 ‘The collapse of the European empires in Asia in
1941 was essentially a demographic failure.’ 2
The second world war made manifest what had been latent for the
previous twenty years. It was indeed a world war, fought in Europe and
Asia, the Atlantic and the Pacific, in the air as well as on land and sea. If
the Western powers (the United States and Britain) with Russia defeated
the Japanese bid for empire in Asia, in Europe it was a war of mutual
extermination, though not pressed, like Laocoon’s struggle with the
serpents, to the extreme end. In it and after it the contours of the con-
temporary world were clear to see: the dwarfing of Europe, the end of
colonial empires, the resurgence of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the
predominance of two super-powers, the United States and Russia, the
consolidation of revolutionary China, and the move into new realms of
scientific discovery, space exploration, technical sophistication, and nuclear
weaponry. The violence of the age had brought nemesis to Europe.
Among its victims the most tragic were the most innocent, the Jews.
The age-old curse of anti-Semitism reached the ultimate in horror and evil
under the Nazis. Jews were killed by the tens of thousands in the German
concentration camps, 1,750,000 in Auschwitz alone. Of 6 i million Jews in
Nazi-dominated countries in 1939 only li million survived the war. In six
years of war one-third of all Jews in the world perished; of Jews in
Europe one-half, of those in central Europe three-quarters. A new word,
genocide, was added to the vocabulary. As their historian has written,
‘never in history had any section of mankind suffered so inhumanly’.*
It is always possible to take a hopeful or a pessimistic view about the
future of mankind. Despair might have predominated in many countries
at the end of the war. It did not. Twenty years later, though public war
and private violence still rage, the historian is less likely to see violence as
the mark of the age. Rather, he sees ‘ one world ’ as something more than a
rhetorical term : a world which might rend itself in racial war or destroy
itself in the collision of two super-powers, but which is increasingly
bound together by common problems, common aspirations, and the
world-wide effects of ever larger advances in science — discovering the
‘secrets of the universe’ and applying the knowledge to new ways of life.
Does this make the first half of the twentieth century a time of transi-
tion from old to new, from modem history to contemporary history?
Has the time of transition ended? Is this the last chapter of modern
history or the first chapter of world history? Perhaps the next Cambridge
History will furnish the answer and Acton’s ‘ultimate history’ at last be
written.
1 G. Barraciough, Introduction to Contemporary History, p. 87; see also pp. 71-4, 83.
2 Ibid. p. 78.
3 Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1955), s.v. Jewish histoiy.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
T he forty years before the second world war brought far-reaching
changes in the ways of life and the standards of living of European
peoples. These changes were wrought by historical forces and events
which had diverse effects in different countries. When the twentieth cen-
tury began Europe already fell into three fairly well-defined regions.
Europe east of the Elbe remained essentially a peasant Europe, where
industrialisation had spread slowly for some fifty years and where national
consciousness had developed speedily, often on a linguistic, family or
racial basis. Economically and socially eastern Europe lagged well behind
most countries west of the Elbe. These, however, fell into two categories.
The nations of the north and west — Scandinavia, the Low Countries,
Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland — had pressed furthest with in-
dustrialisation and with other economic developments which usually
accompanied it. They experienced urbanisation, capital accumulation and
credit organisation, foreign trade, and higher general standards of living.
Areas of the south and south-west — Spain, Portugal, southern Italy and
southern Ireland — belonged geographically (and in certain respects
historically) to the west, but in economic and social underdevelopment
they more closely resembled the countries of the east. Spain and Portugal
had won and lost large imperial possessions in the New World : the residue
of past glories remained a drag on their modern development.
There were, inevitably, important exceptions to this tripartite division.
Some of Austria was almost as industrialised as Germany, whilst parts of
south-west France were as underdeveloped as southern Italy. But the
three regions preserved broad characteristic differences which greatly
affected the impact of twentieth-century changes on their social life. In the
general balance of forces in the continent Germany was the pivot on which
in their relations with one another the three regions turned.
Social changes were many and complex, as well as geographically
diversified, but they may conveniently be considered as falling into two
categories. There were changes in the size, structure and fabric of society,
which included the growth and movements of population, the spread of
towns and communications, the rise of new occupational groups and
social classes. And there were changes in the functioning and pursuits of
society, which included production and distribution of the greater wealth
made available by technological change, the consumption and use of this
greater wealth, and increasing acceptance of new purposes for society
and the state, such as greater ‘social justice’ or ‘social security’. Again,
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
this distinction between structural and functional changes in society is
far from rigid. Perhaps the profoundest change of all took place in the
character and social role of the family, and this was at once both structural
and functional. Throughout, interactions and correlations in time and
place may be more significant than any one aspect of change considered
separately. The transformation of society came about in the process of a
continual interplay between three disparate factors: the fundamental
conditions for economic growth, the social structure and aspirations of
each community, and the political map of Europe in which state bound-
aries only partly coincided with either viable economic units or with
communities socially and nationally homogeneous. Though infinitely
complex the interplay is reducible to some kind of pattern, which in turn
reveals something of the nature and development of European civilisation
in the twentieth century.
During the first half of the twentieth century the world’s population
grew by more than 1,000 millions, which was a larger absolute increase
than had occurred during the whole of the previous century. By 1940,
however, divergencies between Europe and the other continents had not
yet widened sufficiently to change the world’s demographic balance
decisively. The estimated totals were 1,608 millions in 1900, and 2,160
millions by 1940. Of these totals the share of Europe, apart from Russia,
fell from 20 to 18 per cent. But until the 1920s the rate of growth of
European population exceeded that of Asians and Africans: then it began
to be exceeded by that of Asians and Africans. The decline in Europe’s
world supremacy in the twentieth century had this demographic basis.
Internal rates of growth varied greatly, the largest proportionate increases
occurring in the eastern and southern parts of Europe. By 1939 the rate
of increase had become small in all countries of western and northern
Europe, except the Netherlands. Although the population of Europe
(including Russia) increased from some 423 millions in 1900 to 573 millions
in 1940, nearly 100 millions of this increase took place within Russia. 1
Migration from Europe to other continents reflected these facts: the
flow from eastern and southern Europe exceeding that from western
and northern from 1896 onwards, the whole movement reaching a
peak in 1913 and then declining sharply during and after the first world
war.
Significant movements of people from one European country to
another occurred frequently during the period, and for a wide variety of
reasons. Central and eastern Europe were most affected. The long war,
the post-war redrawing of frontiers, social revolution and political
persecution all contributed to the upheaval. The Bolshevik Revolution,
before the civil war ended, produced something between one and two
1 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. vi, part 1 (1965), pp. 59-63.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
million refugees or exiles. Germany after 1919 absorbed some three-
quarters of a million people whose homes lay mainly within the new
Poland, whilst Hungary, much smaller and less industrialised, absorbed
400,000 from its border regions. There was a massive exchange, conducted
under considerable coercion, between Greece and Turkey. The Nazi
terror in Germany and the civil war in Spain sent many thousands more
into exile. Restrictions on immigration imposed by the United States
(1921 and 1924) and by the British Dominions meant that Europe
between the wars had largely to deal unaided with its own population
problems. The main country of reception now was France, underpopulated
because of heavy war losses and a low birth-rate. Between 1920 and 1928
France accepted more than a million and a half foreign workers, mainly
from Italy, Belgium, Poland and Switzerland. The number of resident
foreigners per 10,000 inhabitants rose from 267 in 1901 to 691 in 1931.
Elsewhere the prevalence of unemployment led to resistance to the
admission of migrant workers from abroad. Apart from France, the
internal European migrations were predominantly movements of com-
pulsion or fear. The exodus resulting from selective persecution, such as
flight from Bolshevik and Nazi terror, conferred great cultural benefits on
the societies — usually the tolerant democracies — receiving them.
A further redistribution of population continued to occur within each
country: the migration from countryside to town, matching the trend
toward industrialisation and therefore now increasingly affecting the
eastern European countries. The process continued sufficiently into the
twentieth century to turn most Europeans into townsmen, and then it
tapered off. ‘ Urbanisation’, however, is a relative term, and towns which
one society regards as relatively small and ‘ rural ’ another may regard as
specifically ‘urban’. Indisputably ‘urban’ units, of more than 100,000
inhabitants, were formed very early in Britain. Already by 1831 some
16 per cent of its population lived in such towns: it was 1936 before the
same proportion of Frenchmen did so, and by then 40 per cent of British
people did so. In 1939 there were 81 towns of this size in the Soviet Union,
57 in the United Kingdom, and 56 in Germany, but still only 17 in
France. Throughout Europe as a whole, but at varying rates and to different
extents, the number of large towns tended to increase. Between the 1880s
and the later 1940s the populations of London, Glasgow, Amsterdam,
Vienna and Naples doubled or nearly doubled ; those of Birmingham and
Lisbon nearly trebled ; those of Madrid, Hamburg and Milan grew four-
fold; those of Barcelona, Rome and Prague grew more than fivefold.
If the proportions of the population living in towns of more than 10,000
inhabitants be taken as a general index of undoubted ‘urbanisation’,
Britain and the Netherlands were the most highly urbanised countries of
Europe. By 1946 the percentages in each country living in towns of more
than 10,000 were for Britain and the Netherlands 70; for Italy 53; for
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Germany 47; for Belgium 45; and for France only 33. 1 Although most
Europeans were now town dwellers, most were still small-town dwellers.
But the uprooting of people from village life and rural occupations, their
concentration into urban areas, and their subjection to the disciplines of
factory work and office hours, were features of social change everywhere.
More precisely, it meant in a period of expanding population that the
numbers engaged in agriculture frequently remained static or shrank,
while the increased numbers were almost wholly absorbed into expanding
or new industries, or into the growing ‘tertiary sector’ of transportation,
service or professional occupations demanded by a modem economy. 2
Urban communities of large size usually developed around them
‘suburban’ areas, expanding outer layers from which many workers
travelled daily to work in the city by trams, buses or railways. They were
almost entirely industrial and business centres, large ports and capital
cities. People living in such communities enjoy all the amenities but incur
all the hazards of modern urban civilisation. They are subject to many
different mass-pressures, and are among the first to feel the impact of an
industrial slump and unemployment. They are most at the mercy of
processes of inflation and of administrative control. At the same time,
they are also more susceptible to forces of mass-suggestion and social
unrest, more liable in times of disorder to slide into crime and riot.
Large agglomerations of people exert a gravitational pull, attracting to
themselves more and more incomers from home or abroad. In modem
warfare they are especially vulnerable to attack from the air, as Rotterdam,
Warsaw, Hamburg, Leningrad, London and other European cities were to
give proof during the second world war.
On the other hand townspeople, although more exposed to the fluctua-
tions of the modern economic system and to aerial attack, are also more
open to new ideas and more liable to support movements which can
provide greater security against the hardships of such fluctuations. They
are better able to make effective organised protests against bad conditions.
It is these urban masses in twentieth-century Europe which have given the
main momentum to movements of social reform, as well as to the building
of labour organisations, trade unions, and socialist parties. They have
also been the main seed-beds of movements of unrest and violence. There
have been few peasant revolts in Europe this century.
It is probable that before the first world war the disparities between
town life and country life were sharper than after the second world war,
despite the growth meanwhile of still larger urban and suburban areas.
Until the appearance of cheap and fast road transport and the popularisa-
1 C. P. Kindleberger, Economic Growth in France and Britain, 18 $1-19 50 (1964),
pp. 249-50.
1 Cf. Jean Fourastid, Le grand espoir du xxe. siecle (1947; rev. ed. 1963), for a famous
discussion of the three sectors of activity and how they were affected by the intensity of
technological progress this century.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
tion of radio, the countryman was often virtually cut off from the amenities
of the town in his daily life. Even the railways did not provide the great
ease of movement which came with the internal combustion engine; and
the cinema, unlike radio (and later television), was an amusement mainly of
the towns. The tendency since the 1920s has been for agriculture to
become more mechanised and for the villager to share more easily in the
material facilities of the towns: for him to become more assimilated,
thereby, to the outlooks and patterns of behaviour previously peculiar
to townsmen. At the same time many things have conspired to take the
townsman more into the countryside : the growth of annual holidays with
pay and of cheap rail and road transport; a nostalgic ‘return to nature’;
the cult of the bicycle in France, of the Wandervogel in Germany, of
youth hostels in Britain, of the Boy Scout movement everywhere; the
upheavals and evacuations of war; the institution, even, of compulsory
national service in peace-time, which almost every continental country
had established by 1914 and which Britain accepted after 1939. Whether
the final effect was to impoverish or to enrich rural life, it certainly helped
to soften the differences between rural and urban populations and to create
still greater homogeneity in national life. Where, as in France or Spain,
or in much of eastern Europe, massive urbanisation was comparatively
rare and the distinctive interests and methods of agriculture were more
tenacious, disparities between rural and urban people remained both
clear and significant. It is doubtful whether the impressive increase in
international travel during these years greatly affected the matter. Travel
across frontiers, whether for business or pleasure, is mainly between large
towns, between ports and airports, or directed towards ‘tourist centres’.
In the new conditions in industry in the twentieth century advantages
did not lie entirely with the newer industrial countries as against the old,
although eventually the balance of advantages and disadvantages probably
did (chs. in, xix). The United States were quick to improve and extend
their highways for the benefit of the automobile, and their industrialists
(notably Henry Ford) perfected the chain-belt techniques of mass pro-
duction and the principle of paying workers enough to enable them to
buy the motor-cars they made. Except when a country already had, as had
Belgium and France after the post-war reconstruction of the 1920s, a
system of good roads adequate for first-generation motor-cars, Europeans
were slow to equip themselves to make use of the new inventions. Italy
and Spain lagged behind the north-west, but even in Germany it was the
1 930s before Hitler’s preparations for war included the famous national
network of Autobahnen. The first completed strip, from Frankfurt to
Darmstadt, was opened in May 1935. In 1929 the Liberal party in Britain
fought the general election with the programme We Can Conquer Un-
employment. It urged a large programme of public works, including the
building of a national system of trunk roads and ring roads round cities.
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But annual capital expenditure in Britain on roads and bridges rose to
only £19 million in 1931 and 1932, and by 1936 had fallen back to
£8 million. On the other hand Europeans showed more enterprise than
Americans in developing aviation as a commercial means of transport,
and within Europe Italy and Germany outdistanced France by 1937. In
1920 the Dutch instituted a regular air service between Amsterdam and
London, and throughout the 1920s European capitals came to be linked
by regular commercial air services. In the course of the next decade the
European colonies, too, became linked with the continental capitals by
airlines. Strangely enough United States aviation meanwhile was mainly
limited to military uses and to carrying mail. Internal commercial and
passenger services developed later than in Europe, and it was the eve of
the second world war before Europe and the United States were connected
by a regular air service. The transatlantic telephone had existed since 1 927.
As with development of transport and communications, so, in their
exploitation of the new resources of energy and technology (ch. rv),
European peoples varied considerably in enterprise and success. France
was relatively slow to adopt the new industrial techniques, except in the
outstanding instance of the automobile industry. The two large firms of
Renault and Citroen, and to a lesser extent Peugeot, adopted mass
production methods with the benefit of state credit and large state orders.
Germany was quick to develop those industries in which, before 1914, it
had enjoyed a special lead: notably the chemical, electrical, engineering
and new textile industries. Sweden, which at the beginning of the century
had just tipped in balance from a predominantly agricultural to a pre-
dominantly industrial economy, efficiently developed such appropriate new
industries as pulp and paper-making, electrical products and engineering.
At the other extreme, countries of southern and eastern Europe tended
to remain producers of primary or extractive products. Spain adhered to
farming and mining. Italy even by 1939 exported mainly fruit and market-
garden produce, or textiles and other goods manufactured from imported
raw materials.
The chief changes in the social structure and the balance of social interests
implied by such tendencies contributed, in varying degrees, to blur the old
division between the ‘toiling masses’, engaged in heavy labour involving
little skill or limited skill, and the owners, managers or professional
people who escaped such drudgery. Though the old dichotomy had never
been as clear or as universal as social theorising implied, it certainly
became increasingly unreal in this period. As occupational groups diversi-
fied in character and changed in balance, so the structure of each national
society also changed, often in highly complex ways. The shrinkage of the
Lumpenproletariat in favour of the skilled or clerical worker, the technician
and the professional man or woman, may come to be seen as the greatest
single social change of these years, at least in western Europe. Affecting as
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
it did the daily lives of men and families and their attitudes to one
another, necessitating a vast extension of popular education and technical
training, transferring much effective power from both workers and
capitalists to the managers and manipulators of modern society, this
broad change was to become yet more evident with the applications of
electronics and computers after the second world war.
At the beginning of the century Britain retained her position, won
during the nineteenth century, as the world’s most highly industrialised
country. In 1910 the Board of Trade announced that, whereas 48 per cent
of the population of England and Wales were engaged in manufacturing
and mining, only 40 per cent of Germans, 33 per cent of Frenchmen and
30 per cent of Americans were so employed. In 1936 less than 30 per cent
of Italians (gainfully employed persons over the age of ten years) were
employed in industry; whilst nearly 48 per cent were engaged in agricul-
ture, as compared with (in 193 1) 35 per cent in France and only 6 per cent
in Britain. The proportion of a nation’s labour force engaged in agricul-
ture declined everywhere in Europe during these decades. Even in a
heavily agricultural country such as Denmark it fell slowly to 40 per cent
by 19 1 1, then more rapidly to 28 per cent by 1939. In the Soviet Union
the decrease was dramatic, because of collectivisation and the extension of
large-scale mechanised farming. Between 1926 and 1939 the number of
Russians employed in agriculture fell absolutely by 10-20 per cent, and, in
terms of a proportion of the total population, it dropped from more than
75 per cent to about 56 per cent. 1
For a complex of reasons the ’thirties in Europe brought a sharpening
of class conflicts and a widening of the gulf between capitalist and working-
class interests. In France (ch. xvii) the outcry against the ‘economic
oligarchies’ entrenched in ‘financial feudalism’ was a sharply defined
version of a complaint raised in many other countries.
It was shown how ‘two hundred families’, through common stockholding, inter-
locking relationships, and similar devices, kept the posts of command of French
economy firmly in hand, and publicity was given to the fact that fewer than 150
persons, most of them connected by marriage and family ties, held more than 1,900
seats in the administration of the mast important corporations in the fields of coal,
power, steel, oil, chemicals, railroads, banking, and insurance. 2
From Germany’s industrialists and financiers such as Alfred Hugenberg,
Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen, Hitler's National Socialist party
received vital backing in its rise to power, but whether more from fear
of communism or more from hopes of profitable rearmament remains in
some doubt (ch. xvi). Thyssen later admitted, ‘I have personally given
altogether one million marks to the National Socialist party.’ 3 Others,
1 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. vi, part 1 (1965), p. 24.
2 H. W. Ehrmann, French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation (1947), p. 13.
8 Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler (1941), p. 133. He considered (p. 134) that ‘all in all, the
amounts given by heavy industry to the Nazis may be estimated at two million marks a year ’.
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such as von Krupp, opposed Hitler before he came to power but profitably
supported the party once it had gained power.
In Spain social conflicts, which elsewhere either produced ‘ popular front ’
alignments of the left and centre to prevent fascist coups, or led to actual
coups, resulted in both together and in prolonged civil war. Beginning in
June 1936 as an army revolt against the Popular Front republican govern-
ment (which communists had helped to power but in which, as in its French
counterpart, they held no office), the Spanish civil war combined old and
new internal schisms with international power rivalries in a most explosive
mixture. The ferocious fighting which ensued had far-reaching social and
psychological implications for the Europe of the 1930s. Against a back-
ground of economic slump which especially affected agricultural exports and
metallurgical mining industries, and of political instability and anarchistic
violence, its three years of bloodshed left Spain an impoverished and
exhausted country, the battlefield of social and ideological enmities.
Here were ranged the masters of economic power in the country, led by the Army,
and supported by the Church, that embodiment of Spain’s past glory. All these
believed that they were about to be overwhelmed. Opposed to them were ‘the
professors’— many of the enlightened middle class — and almost the entire labour
force of the country, maddened by years of insult, misery, and neglect, intoxicated
by the knowledge of the better conditions enjoyed by their class comrades in France
and Britain and by the actual mastery which they supposed that the working class
had gained in Russia . 1
The forces most liable to disrupt societies which lacked the larger
cohesiveness of strong national feeling were illustrated even more clearly
in the experience of the Republic of Austria between the wars. The Treaty
of Saint Germain forced together two radically different societies, the
large, cosmopolitan industrial city of Vienna and the conservative.
Catholic, agrarian provinces of the new republic. Geographical and ad-
ministrative segregation of the social classes within one state resulted in
the Social Democrats ruling the city with a rival Christian Social majority
in the Nationalrat. In 1932, after a period of uneasy co-existence, of re-
current inflation culminating in economic slump, of interference from
fascist Italy and frequent militant demonstrations, the country succumbed
to the clericalist and authoritarian rule of Chancellor Dollfuss, who in
1933 suspended parliamentary government.
The structure of society in Europe, though changing in many different
ways during these years under the pressures described, remained ulti-
mately nationalist in character. It was not only that the peace settlement
of 1919 redrew the map on more nationalistic principles: it was also that
states which could not rely upon the cement of national community in
face of the disruptive forces of economic distress, political ideology and
social conflict tended to fall subject to dictatorship. This was as true of
1 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (1961 ; rev. ed. 1965), p. 159.
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Russia in 1917 and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 as it was of
Germany in 1933, or Spain in 1939.
The ultimate gains of the whole transformation of society by 1939
went most substantially to nationalism. States resorted to protection-
ist measures or to schemes of public works on a national scale in face
of the economic slump. The democracies which most lacked national
cohesion — Italy, Austria, Spain, Czechoslovakia — suffered disruption or
the imposition of authoritarian rule. Within the single-party states of the
1 930s it was in each instance the more nationalistic wing of the party
which triumphed over the more reformist wing: Stalinists routed Trot-
skyists, Hitler and Himmler purged the ‘second revolutionaries’ in 1934,
Mussolini and the imperialists had their way in Abyssinia and Spain and
crushed internal fascist dissent. In Britain, Belgium and France national
coalitions contrived to preserve national cohesion by moderate reforms
and by withstanding the extremists of left and right. The main international
organisations — the League of Nations, the Third (Communist) Inter-
national, even the Roman Catholic church — were unable to hold their
own against the powerful appeals of nationalist separatism. Already, in
the colonial world, movements of national independence and unification
were raising their heads — in India, the Far East, Africa (chs. xi, xn, xra).
This overriding fact coloured all social changes, whether of structure and
fabric, or of working and purpose.
The commonest use to which the new wealth of society was put was, of
course, improvement in the standard of living of some or all sections of
the population. Both the extent and the incidence of better standards of
living are, however, difficult to assess, not least because no entirely
satisfactory test of ‘standard of living’ has been devised. Real wages are
little guide in a rural society where a large part of personal or family
income is in kind ; or in a highly developed welfare state where a large part
of real income takes the form of free or subsidised social services; or in a
period (as this was in many countries) when married women are in-
creasingly taking employment. Vital matters such as the general standard
of housing and the kinds of food customarily eaten must enter into
any comparison of standards of living in different countries, or even in
one country at different times. So, too, the frequency of unemployment
or of underemployment, and the degree of security against sickness and
old age, are important components of any realistic criterion of well-being.
Above all, since a standard of living is of no use without life itself, such
data as the infant death-rate and expectation of life are useful indications
of the medical services available, conditions of housing and nutrition,
and the amount of human suffering endured. 1
1 Infant death-rate is the number of infants, per thousand bom alive, who die during the
first year of life. The expectation of life is the average age to which a person is likely to live
if the death-rate of the year when he or she was bom remains unchanged.
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Measured by the tests of vital statistics, the United Kingdom made
great and steady progress. In 1900-2, infants under one year old died at
the rate of 142 per thousand; in 1920-2 at the average annual rate of 82;
in 1930-2 at the rate of 67; in 1938-9 at the rate of 54. 1 By the same test
France made equally rapid progress but at a lower standard. Her infant
death rate averaged 161 per thousand in 1896-1900; 97 in 1920-4; 80 in
1930-4; and 71 in 1935-9. Although it was as high as 112 again in the
critical year 1945, it more than halved (to 52) in 1950. In both countries
the most striking improvement came after 1945. In the United Kingdom
it fell from 49 in 1945 to only 31 in 1950. In 1950 Sweden, with only 21
per thousand, could claim the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.
In most European countries it at least halved during the first half of the
century, and dropped especially markedly between 1930 and 1950.
Similar improvements in the general expectation of life occurred during
the period. Within the hundred years, 1850-1950, western civilisation
added a full generation to the average length of life. In a number of the
more advanced countries, during the fifty years before 1900, the expecta-
tion of life increased by about 2 years each decade ; during the fifty years
after 1900 increase was accelerated to about 3^-4 years each decade. As a
result, and as some index of this new tenacity of life, the population of
Europe excluding Russia grew from roughly 310 to 396 millions between
1900 and 1950. In this way Europe continued into the twentieth century,
though with diminished momentum, its remarkable propensity to grow
in population, despite declines in some national birth-rates and despite the
heavy losses and dislocations of two world wars.
It was industrialisation, world trade, and improvement in methods of
agriculture and transport that made it possible to maintain this increased
population on a generally improving standard of living. Because the speed
and the extent of industrialisation and the use of more scientific methods
of production varied from one country to another, there remained wide
disparities in their average standards of life : differences almost as great as
those between European and non-European countries. In Spain the ex-
pectation of life at the age of one year in 1940 (52-4 for males, 58-8 for
females) was still lower than that in France had been in 1900: and the
infant mortality rate of Rumania in 1940 (188 per thousand) was about
the same level as that of France a century before, and higher than that of
India in 1940. In 1948 the Department of Economic Affairs of the United
Nations surveyed differences in European standards of living and at-
tempted to assess them comparatively in terms of the national income
per head of the population in 1938, computed in terms of United States
dollars. The range was as wide as from Great Britain (378) and the
Netherlands (367) to France (236), Italy (127) and Greece (80). Regionally
the range was highest in north-western Europe (362) and second highest in
1 Annual Abstract of Statistics, no. 94, p. 35.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
western Europe (262), with a sharp drop in central and north-eastern
countries (132) and south and south-eastern including Italy (89). Before the
second world war changes in the standard of living of Europeans had thus
followed the familar regionalised pattern. 1
Beyond such indications few valid generalisations can be made, save
that broadly (though unevenly) there was notable improvement in physical
health and length of life, and a general advance in the material well-being
of the masses. This improvement included a general shortening of the
working day and the working week, and even a contraction of the working
life brought about by the tendency to raise the school-leaving age and to
introduce a conventional age for retirement and superannuation. But
material betterment was uneven for many diverse reasons. Whereas the
large-scale migrations of the early decades improved both the standards
of living of the migrants and the conditions of trade available to those
who remained in Europe, the scale of migration overseas shrank con-
siderably in the decades after 1914. In the Soviet Union under the first
Five-Year Plan, and in the ‘people’s democracies’ of eastern Europe after
1945, deliberate emphasis on capital investment for expanding heavy
industry, at the expense of agriculture and immediate consumer goods,
kept down the standard of living. Everywhere heavy expenditure on
armed forces and armaments competed with consumer demands in the
great dilemma of ‘guns or butter’.
If wealth was more abundant, property was more insecure. The half-
century was studded with wars, revolutions, and economic crises, each
of which in turn wrought havoc with the previous distribution of wealth
and social structure. The first world war brought the collapse of the old
dynastic empires of Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Russia. This collapse
involved the overthrow of much of the aristocracy and landed nobility.
Throughout eastern Europe the old order went down in the violence of
war and revolution. Within Russia, after the Bolshevik Revolution, land,
factories, property of all kinds were confiscated. Power and control of
wealth fell to new ruling cadres of party and state. In Germany land-
owners joined with the army and the new industrialists to retain political
and economic power in their own hands ; or, as in Hungary, they stemmed
the tide of revolution by violent reaction. The great currency crash in
Germany in 1923 ruined the bulk of the middle and rentier classes, and
effected social upheaval at a level at which it had been evaded in 1919.
During the world economic crisis of 1929-32 bankruptcies and mass
unemployment brought ruin to many who had previously known pros-
perity. After 1933 the National Socialist regime confiscated the property
of Jews and all who fell victim to the charge of political opposition. After
1939 the process was extended to all German-occupied territories. It
1 Economic Survey of Europe in 1948, Department of Economic Affairs, United Nations
(1949), p. 235.
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was reversed by the post-war governments, who attacked collaborators
and those who had profited from national misfortunes. In eastern
Europe the new communist regimes after 1945 repeated much of the story
of Russia after 1917. Meanwhile both world wars, and the political and
racial persecutions of the inter-war and post-war years, resulted in a vast
uprooting of millions of displaced persons and refugees who were left
homeless and often destitute.
Which social classes gained or lost most by these upheavals it is difficult
to determine. It is probable that the peasantry, still the substructure of
much of Europe’s economy, on balance gained from the changes. In
eastern Europe they gained more land. The economic depression of the
1920s provoked government assistance for agriculture, greater mechanisa-
tion and more intensive cultivation. The 1930s were a period of steadily
rising food production, and by 1939 agriculture was in a healthy state in
most countries on the continent. The upheavals of war, German occu-
pation, and liberation were accompanied by a steep decline in production
and often by hunger and starvation. But except in the battle-areas these
upheavals tended to hit urban rather than rural populations, and the
strenuous efforts made, with American help, to restore European pros-
perity after the war brought a quick return to pre-war levels of production.
The world shortage of food after the war meant high prices, official sub-
sidies and encouragement, and frequently (as in France) a positive raising
of the standards of living of the peasant above pre-war levels.
Landowners, though suffering less from inflation than the middle
classes and less from currency collapse than the rentier class, suffered
more from drastic confiscations. Industrialists, traders and shippers suf-
fered from the world economic depression and from war-time confisca-
tions, controls, and destruction. During the profound social revolution
which occurred in Germany between 1923 and 1933, members of the
middle classes whose incomes derived from salaries, pensions, small shops
and businesses, the rental of real estate or interest on bonds or mortgages
were usually reduced to great poverty. Meanwhile others gained : debtors,
employers on a large scale, speculative investors, and farmers who,
because they paid a fixed rent or owned their land, could benefit from
rising prices. Industrial and agricultural workers, and many black-coated
workers, suffered most acutely from mass unemployment during the
world economic crisis. In most countries there appeared a persistent and
growing army of unemployed. In Germany it approached 5 millions in
1930 and exceeded 6 millions by the beginning of 1932. In Great Britain
it numbered 2 millions at certain times during 1921 and 1922, and reached
nearly 3 millions in the years 193 1-3. No European country suffered
from mass unemployment more than Germany. France, being less depen-
dent on foreign trade for her national prosperity, suffered less and later
than either Germany or Britain.
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Human anxieties, deprivations and destitution were the other side of
the coin to the new abundance which modem technology made available to
Europe. Amid plenty, poverty seemed more intolerable. This helps to
explain the intensity and universality of the demand that the state should
provide greater social security and undertake a more systematic redistribu-
tion of wealth. Repeatedly the normal hierarchy of wealth was violently
upset. The divorce of economics from politics, which had underlain mid-
nineteenth-century doctrines of laissez faire and free trade, could not
survive such experiences. From the years before 1914 derived a more
insistent demand for ‘social justice’, and with it a repertoire of devices by
which greater social justice might be attained. The adoption and extension
of these measures was, accordingly, a further main aspect of social change
in this period.
The demand for social justice involved several interlocked procedures.
It meant, first, completing that democratic revolution of the previous
century which had moved towards universal suffrage and the extension of
civic liberties and rights to all citizens. It meant, secondly, achieving
greater social equality: an attack on extremes of wealth and poverty, a
concern for greater equality of opportunity in education and for careers
open to talents. It meant, thirdly, greater social security: protecting the
individual and the family against the hazards and vicissitudes of an indus-
trial society and an unstable world economy; providing safeguards against
the poverty that could come from sickness or disability of the wage-earner,
from periodic or chronic unemployment, from old age. It meant, finally,
a new code of behaviour between different communities : extending self-
government and civic rights to colonial peoples ; co-operating with other
nations in a rich variety of international bodies for promoting higher
standards of living everywhere. So intense and so persistent was the
general demand for greater social justice that by 1950 every European
government was committed to such measures. The old division between
economic and political activity was totally abandoned, and every state
was engaged in implementing programmes of social security, economic
regulation, and full employment. That intimate reciprocal relationship
between state and society, government and nation, which was the outcome
of both nationalism and democracy in the nineteenth century, was ela-
borated and carried very much further in the first half of the twentieth.
By 1900 most states of western Europe had either established universal
suffrage or were approaching it. All Frenchmen of 21 and over had had
the vote since 1870; all men in Germany since 1871, in Switzerland since
1874, in Belgium since 1893, in the Netherlands since 1896, in Norway
since 1898. Although the minimum age varied the principle was generally
accepted. Universal male suffrage was introduced in Sweden and Austria
in 1907, Turkey in 1908, Italy in 1912. In Finland and Norway even
women gained the vote in 1907. After 1918 the fashion for democratic
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
government prevailed, and all the new states of Europe adopted democratic
constitutions with universal suffrage. In 1918 women over 30 gained the
vote in the United Kingdom; in 1919 women over 20 gained it in the
German Republic. Turkey enfranchised women in 1934. By 1950 equal
female suffrage became general throughout Europe. It was attained in
Russia in 1918, in Britain in 1928, France in 1945, Italy in 1946, Belgium
in 1948; and Switzerland remained the only outstanding exception. The
general acceptance of equal political rights for both sexes had far-reaching
but somewhat incalculable effects on representative government. It
usually more than doubled the size of the electorate within a single genera-
tion. It compelled political parties to compete for the female vote in a
way which may partly explain enthusiasm for systems of pensions for the
widowed and aged, national health services and family allowances. The
new electoral pressure of women reinforced other tendencies promoting
the Welfare State.
The social revolution of twentieth-century Europe, which in most coun-
tries resulted in a new status for women, went much deeper in its causes
than the agitation for female suffrage and much wider in its consequences
than the extension of electorates. It was closely linked with the demo-
cratic ideal of equality, which emphasised the basic claim of every human
being to equal civil and political rights. It was also part of a more com-
prehensive change of outlook in social life. This came with the decline
in the infant mortality rate which freed women from the burden of fre-
quent pregnancies; with more scientific facilities for birth-control and
the fashion for smaller families; with opportunities for the employment
of women (including married women) in offices, factories, restaurants
and retail stores; with the extension of popular education to girls as well
as boys; with a general demand for greater leisure and comfort. In Britain
the average number of children per family was over five in the 1 870s, three
or four around 1900, but about two in the 1920s and 1930s. With the
growing demand for female labour in factories and offices, domestic
servants became more scarce, but the demand for them also declined. As
housewives, women found their drudgery diminished by a host of labour-
saving devices and by more abundant supplies of cheap soap, cheap
furnishing materials, and more modern homes. Women in Britain and in
some European countries supplied a large additional labour force in both
world wars. Less economic subservience to their fathers or husbands made
them more independent in spirit, more assertive of legal and social rights
which legislatures, increasingly anxious to satisfy the demands of the new
female electorates, readily granted. In the whole process cause and effect
were usually indistinguishable. Again the change varied greatly in extent
from one country to another, and it was discontinuous. The proportion of
women in paid employment in France was less in 1926 than it had been
in 1906. Female emancipation was often resisted by the influence of the
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
Roman church. The dictatorships of the inter-war years, especially the
German, discouraged it and tried to raise the birth-rate and force women
back into the kitchen and the nursery. In deference to this policy, the
National Socialist regime in Germany failed to mobilise women for the
war effort as thoroughly as did Great Britain. 1
The eventual outcome in most countries, however, was a far-reaching
transformation in the status and condition of women and of the most
important single unit of social life, the family. What Professor Titmuss
could claim for Britain of the 1950s was coming to be true, in varying
degrees, of women in most European countries :
... it would seem that the typical working-class mother of the 1890s, married in her
teens or early twenties and experiencing ten pregnancies, spent about fifteen years in
a state of pregnancy and in nursing a child for the first year of its life. She was
tied, for this period of time, to the wheel of childbearing. Today, for the typical
mother, the time so spent would be about four years. A reduction of such magnitude
in only two generations in the time devoted to childbearing represents nothing less
than a revolutionary enlargement of freedom for women brought about by the
power to control their own fertility. 2
Moreover a woman aged 45 in 1931 could expect, on average, to live to
the age of 73 : in the 1890s she could have expected to live only to the age
of 67. It may therefore be claimed that ‘what these changes mean is that
by the time the typical mother of today has virtually completed the cycle
of motherhood she still has practically half her total life expectancy to
live. . .For the generality of women in most societies of which we have
any reliable records this is a new situation. ’ 3
Sociologists are agreed that the family in these years underwent two
important changes, though they disagree considerably about the signifi-
cance of the changes. One was that the ‘nuclear family’ of parents-and-
children became somewhat more important than the ‘extended family’ or
‘kinship’. This happened chiefly because of the movements of population
already noted, which for many destroyed the old bonds of neighbourhood
and physical proximity, and because of the greater mobility and oppor-
tunities of labour in a modem industrial system. The other was that the
nuclear family itself underwent important modifications because of the
mother taking jobs and enjoying more personal freedom, its smaller size,
and the growth of leisure. In general, it may be said that the family at all
social levels became a more co-operative and less authoritarian community,
more independent of the wider ‘kinship’ of grandparents, uncles and
aunts, more likely to own specific property (the family house, the family
1 The number of women employed in the German civilian labour force actually declined
by about a quarter of a million during the first two years of war, and fell from 14,636,000
on 31 May 1939 to 14,437,000 three years later (see Hitler's Europe, ed. Arnold Toynbee
and Veronica M. Toynbee, Royal Institute of International Affairs (1954), pp. 8, 226 and
234 )-
2 R. M. Titmuss, Essays on ' The Welfare State' (1958), p. 91. 8 Ibid. p. 93.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
car) and to act as a separate group (the family holiday). This independence
was in some ways buttressed by social services, giving in times of need
support that was once given by the kinship, and through family allowances
increasing the family’s resources in some proportion to its responsibilities.
One feature of the history of the family in twentieth-century society
calls for special emphasis. The major changes in its role and character
have come about unintentionally as consequential effects of economic and
social trends or world events, rather than as the results of deliberate
policies or political enactments. The transformation brought about by
industrialisation, population movements, improved standards of living
and leisure has already been mentioned. In Germany and Britain in the
’twenties traditional parental authority was probably weakened more by
mass unemployment, producing conditions in which the father might
cease to be the family wage-earner, than by any legislative enactments. The
two world wars caused more fundamental upheavals in family life than
any events other than the world economic slump. British statistics of
divorce, for example, show a steady low incidence of divorce from the
beginning of the century until around 1918, when it sharply increased;
then the incidence declined, though not to pre-war level, and remained
steady until just before 1939; it increased again sharply until 1947, after
which it again declined. Although other factors, including changes in the
law such as the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, must be taken into
account, it appears that wars are probably the greatest single cause of
increased incidence of divorce. 1
On the other hand, strenuously pursued governmental policies in-
tended to change the habits or functioning of family life have con-
spicuously failed. Mussolini’s efforts to boost the Italian family and the
birth-rate proved to be powerless against the general European trend of
the later ’twenties and early ’thirties towards lower birth-rates: and on
this point fascist propaganda and inducements were backed up by clerical
exhortations. Although Italy’s population increased, from about 32
millions at the beginning of the century to roughly 37 millions in 1922 and
nearly 43 millions in 1936, the increase was due neither to more marriages
nor to a higher birth-rate. The rate of births actually fell from 32-7
per thousand in 1901-5 to 29-5 per thousand in 1922-5 and then to 23-7
in 1938. In 1938 Italy’s net reproduction rate (1-131) was lower than that
of the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal or even Bulgaria. The experience of
the Soviet Union gave yet more dramatic evidence that even totalitarian
regimes are relatively powerless against deep-rooted human habits and
attitudes. After the revolution Bolshevik policy (though contrary to
Lenin’s own inclinations) was completely hostile to family life. Divorce
was made easy, however often it was sought, birth-control and abortion
1 See Griselda Rowntree and Norman H. Carrier, ‘The Resort to Divorce in England
and Wales, 1858-1957’, in Population Studies, XL, no. 3 (March 1958).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
were encouraged, all former external compulsions designed to preserve
the family were abolished. For a few years, at least in the cities, family
life seemed to have been shattered. But in the country at large the
mass of the Russian people continued to fall in love, get married, raise
children and build homes for their families. From 1936 onwards the
Soviet government reversed its policy, lauded the family, reimposed
external compulsions, and condemned ‘free love and disorder in sexual
life’ as signs of bourgeois decadence. 1 An official policy which may more
plausibly be claimed to have succeeded is the French system of family
benefits and allowances, instituted in the form of a requirement of
contributions from all employers in 1932, and elaborated in 1939 into a
Code de la Famille. As implemented during and after the war the main
purpose was to strengthen the family and boost the birth-rate. French
birth-rates did, in fact, rise sharply after the war, and the contrast with
pre-war trends was so sharp that many attributed the change to the
generous system of family allowances and privileges since then granted
to parents of large families. But even this is doubtful, and proof either way
is virtually impossible. 2 By the time the rise in birth-rate became evident
the system was not only incorporated into the still wider system of
Securite sociale of 1945, but French society and social attitudes were
undergoing the drastic upheavals of post-war reconstruction. Similar
situations existed in other liberated countries.
Likewise, as regards housing, surprisingly few major states have a
good record of successful policies. In many places slum-clearance and the
building of workers’ flats or of new housing estates were accomplished,
but on a national scale such measures were seldom adequate to the basic
problems. Urban and suburban development too often took place un-
planned and without regard to the community’s long-term interests. The
second world war gave impetus to more radical rethinking of these
problems by shattering many urban areas and imposing the need for
systematic rebuilding.
Two ways in which governmental measures impinged much more
decisively and significantly on social change were in the provision of free
public education, and in the adoption of comprehensive systems of what,
following the United States example of 1935, came to be called ‘social
security’. Such activities were common to democracies and dictatorships,
and to both capitalist and communist regimes, and everywhere they
became normal major activities of the modem state.
Already, by 1914, all Europe was being sent to school. Free compulsory
education, at least at the primary level, was accepted as the normal or
1 See Sir John Maynard, The Russian Peasant and other Studies (1942 11962 ed.),pp. 521-5 ;
Maurice Hindus, Mother Russia (1943). A law of July 1944 consolidated the new official
attitude to the family, motherhood and parental authority.
3 Cf. Laurence Wylie in France: Change and Tradition (1963), p. 191.
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desirable arrangement in most countries. In France instruction had been
free in all state primary schools since 1881, and compulsory for all
children between the ages of 6 and 13 since 1882. In England a law of 1870
empowered local school boards to require attendance at primary schools ;
in 1881 compulsion became general, and ten years later elementary educa-
tion became free. Comparable measures were passed during the same
decades or earlier in most countries of north-western Europe, so that
after 1900 their peoples were becoming increasingly literate. During the
twentieth century literacy was similarly promoted in the Soviet Union
after 1917, in Turkey under Mustafa Kemal, and throughout southern
and eastern Europe, though often without complete success. In Portugal
in 1950 more than 40 per cent of the population over the age of seven
could not read or write; in Bulgaria in 1946 nearly a quarter of the whole
population was illiterate.
The increase of literacy everywhere was accompanied by a great develop-
ment of secondary and technical education and by expansion of university
education. The number of pupils at French lycees and colleges doubled in
the forty years before 1937 : those going on to higher education much more
than doubled. In Britain the Board of Education came into being in 1900,
and the Act of 1902 prepared the way for a rapid growth of secondary
education under central stimulus. This in turn generated a demand for
the expansion of higher education. The Education Acts of 1918 and 1944
went far towards providing a complete system of national education,
though British universities expanded more slowly than most. The number
of students at British universities less than doubled in the forty years
before 1939. The University of Wales was formed in 1903 and six new
English universities were founded, at Birmingham (1900), Liverpool
(1903), Leeds (1904), Sheffield (1905), Bristol (1909) and Reading (1926).
In several other countries these years saw establishment of new univer-
sities. The Portuguese universities of Lisbon and Oporto were founded in
1911. In 1924 new Italian universities were founded at Bari, Florence,
Milan and Trieste, and in 1944 at Salerno. The Danish university of
Aarhus was founded in 1928, the Norwegian university of Bergen in 1946,
but by that date many countries including Britain were beginning a new
phase of rapid expansion of higher education and learning. The Soviet
Union between 1917 and 1941 increased the number of its colleges and
universities from 90 to 782.
In many countries, notably France, Germany, Italy and Belgium, this
rapid expansion of state-provided or state-aided public education involved
conflict between the state and the church, which had previously been the
chief provider of education. This conflict was particularly acute where the
Roman Catholic church predominated, and in France it precipitated the
separation of church from state in 1905. In such countries the education
provided in state schools and in teachers’ training colleges was usually
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positivist and secular, imbued with a strong spirit of anti-clericalism.
A similar conflict revived under the dictatorships, which strove to in-
doctrinate the whole youth of the nation with their own secular ideologies.
It recurred from time to time in the democracies, as in Britain after the
Act of 1902, and in Alsace and Lorraine after their return to France in
1919.
These triumphs of liberal democracy in Europe were accompanied by
a fundamental challenge to it. Even in the first decade of the century it
became apparent that the developments already described might in aggre-
gate move in either of two possible directions. They might tend, as liberal
democrats expected and believed, towards the creation of a well-informed
and thoughtful public opinion, seeking to use the power of the vote
critically and reasonably, and in conformity with democratic ideals as
these had been inherited from the rationalist democratic movement of the
late eighteenth century. Or they might move in the direction of mass
emotion, the subjection of public opinion to the power of propaganda,
and the manipulation of the irrational impulses inherent in crowds and
mobs. Popular education, movements for adult education, 1 the more
responsible sections of the press and the provision of free libraries en-
couraged the tendency towards thoughtfulness and responsibility. Com-
mercial advertising eager to capture the rising purchasing-power of the
working classes, the sensational press made cheap by the support of
advertisers, the more aggressive movements of nationalism, encouraged
the contrary forces of irrationalism and mass excitement. Before 1914
it was clear that the second tendency was at least as probable and inherent
an outcome of the new democracy as the first. Social theorists like Gustave
Le Bon in France and Graham Wallas in England explored these questions
with apprehension. 2 Popular hysteria and violence of feeling, such as
were induced in Britain by the Boer War, in France by the Dreyfus Case,
in Germany by the agitation for colonial and naval expansion, and in the
United States by the Spanish-American War, revealed something of the
capacities for violence endemic in the urban, nationalist and more literate
societies of 1900.
What was new after 1900 was not human susceptibility to the arts of
persuasion and propaganda. Great leaders in all ages had shown how
opinion could be moulded. The popular associations of the nineteenth
century had discovered all the arts of mass-agitation. Nor was it novel
1 In Britain the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London began extra-mural
activities in the 1870s: the Workers’ Educational Association was founded in 1903, its
Swedish counterpart in 1908, and the French universites populates between 1899 and 1903.
The famous Danish People’s High Schools dated from as early as 1844.
3 Gustave Le Bon’s Psychology des foules appeared in 1 895, Graham Wallas’s Human
Nature in Politics in 1908. Psychologists like William McDougall and sociologists like
Gabriel Tarde developed, in the years before 1914, the more scientific study of social
behaviour which then continued to make headway throughout the period.
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for nationalist pride and aggression to capture popular enthusiasm. The
novelties were the exposure of semi-literate urban populations to more
intense and sustained pressure from propagandists of business and press,
and the enhanced importance of the reactions of these populations be-
cause of universal suffrage, state activity and international tensions. The
immense physical and emotional strains imposed by the four years of the
first world war were quickly followed by the further expansion of media
of mass persuasion in the form of the cinema, the radio, and large public
meetings made possible by electrical amplification. Between the two wars
it seemed that democracy had merely made the world safe for dictatorship.
The monolithic parties of Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, National-Socialist
Germany, and their counterparts in some other states, seized and kept
power by skilful manipulation of all the latest means for exploiting the
irrational, pathological impulses of men and women in modem society.
These forces, more harmlessly expressed by fashion, the hero-worship of
sports favourites and film-stars, and the phenomena of song-crazes and
best-selling novels, came to be harnessed to politics and (as in the propa-
ganda which accompanied the Five-Year Plans in the Soviet Union) to
economics. By 1950 television opened up still further possibilities of the
same kind: and even in the most stable parliamentary democracies
electioneering by film, radio and television became no less important than
electioneering by poster, press and public meeting. 1
States that were becoming increasingly democratic in structure and
spirit also became providers of social services. Here, too, a certain pattern
had been inherited from the later nineteenth century. By 1914 every Euro-
pean country outside Russia and the Balkans had relatively well-developed
codes of factory and labour legislation. In the 18 80s Bismarck had
introduced legislation which equipped Germany with a comprehensive
national system of social insurance against sickness, accident, and in-
capacity in old age, and in 19 11 it was codified and extended to various
classes of non-industrial workers, such as agricultural labourers and
domestic servants. By 1913 some 14^ million people were thus insured,
and codes of factory legislation and of child labour were added. Germany’s
neighbours, impressed by these measures, were quick to imitate them in
whole or in part. In 19 11 the United Kingdom introduced its first
National Insurance Act, setting up a contributory scheme insuring a large
part of the working population against sickness, providing for free medical
attention, and insuring some categories of workers against unemployment.
Belgium and Denmark, like Britain, imitated Germany’s scheme of in-
surance against accident, sickness, and old age. Austria introduced
accident and sickness insurance in the 1880s, Italy and Switzerland in the
1 See R. B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 194s (1947),
ch. vn ; H. G. Nicholas, The British General Election of 1950 (1951), ch. vl
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1890s. In these years, too, Britain, France, Norway, Spain and the
Netherlands passed legislation which obliged employers to compensate
their workers for accidents which occurred during work. France introduced
compulsory social insurance only in 1928. This expansion of state
responsibility for the safety and well-being of its citizens, combined with
the urbanisation of much of European society, brought about a general
overhaul of local government and administration. By 1914 democratised
and active municipal governments had endowed Europe with a great new
equipment of public utility services of sanitation, water, gas, electricity and
transport, and of hospitals, markets, laundries, slaughter-houses, labour
exchanges, museums, recreation grounds, parks, libraries, schools, and
all the other amenities of modem urban life.
The increased activities of government, both national and local, called
for new fiscal policies. Until after 1871 direct income tax had been a
device almost peculiar to Great Britain. With electorates of consumers
indirect taxes became unpopular, and progressive direct taxation, scientifi-
cally assessed and collected in proportion to income or wealth, came into
favour. In his budget of 1909 Mr Lloyd George included the whole gamut
of fiscal devices which had been evolving in Britain for some years : heavy
duties on tobacco and liquor, heavier death-duties on personal estates,
which had first been introduced by Sir William Harcourt in 1894, graded
and heavier income tax, an additional ‘super-tax’ on incomes above a
fairly high level, a duty of 20 per cent on the unearned increment of land-
values, and a charge on the capital value of undeveloped land and minerals.
During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental
expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and
her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all
introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments
repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death
duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of
income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed
people to heavier taxation. In 1920 the French ambassador, M. Paul
Cambon, could remark to Mr Churchill: ‘In the twenty years I have been
here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching
than the French Revolution itself. The governing class have been almost
entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their
property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost impercep-
tibly and without the loss of a single life.’ 1 If M. Cambon was exag-
gerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became
substantially true after the second world war. Already in 1937 it was
calculated that 5 or 6 per cent of the national income was being redistri-
buted from rich to poor.
A landmark in the history of social security in Europe was the Report on
1 Winston S. Churchill, My Early Years (1930; new ed. 1947), p. 90.
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Social Insurance and Allied Services published by Lord Beveridge in 1942.
It won wide international acceptance as a social creed for the post-war
world, even when the methods he proposed were unacceptable. It found
fullest embodiment in the British National Insurance Act of 1946, the
National Health Service Act of the same year, and the National Assistance
Act of 1948, all passed by the Labour government. These measures unified
the previous systems of insurance against sickness, disability, unemploy-
ment and old age into a national scheme of social security organised by
the state, though leaving room for further voluntary provision; extended
universally the provision of free medical and dental services; and ended
the old poor law. A system of family allowances, also advocated in the
Beveridge Report, was instituted in 1946; and on a much more lavish
scale in France in 1945-6, as part of its General Scheme of Social Security.
Comparable provisions had existed in Spain since 1939, and were insti-
tuted in Belgium in 1944 and Norway in 1946. Social security, the notion
of public protection for the individual and the family against sickness,
poverty, unemployment, squalor and ignorance, ‘from the cradle to the
grave’, was the social ideal generated by the bitter experiences of the
inter-war years.
These aims involved not only the provision of minimal social services
such as public education, health services and old-age pensions, but the
adoption by governments of a policy of ‘full employment’. This policy
was designed to forestall and prevent, by measures of currency and trade
regulation and public investment programmes, a return of unemployment
on a massive scale. Without full employment it was unlikely that social
services could be maintained. It was now widely accepted in Europe
that extremes of wealth and poverty should be avoided; that whilst
national standards of living depended largely on world trade, the average
standard of living in any country should be maintained at as high a level
as possible by deliberate state action and regulation. The whole climate
of opinion was completely changed from that of 1900, which outside
Germany had distrusted state action. In most countries of eastern Europe
more drastic policies of collectivisation were followed by the Communist
governments which held power after the second world war.
Within the general pattern of promoting social welfare and security by
state action and provision of social services, differences of circumstances
and of emphasis left distinctive marks on each country’s arrangements.
Thus the French system was dominated by demographic policy, and used
its family allowances and health provision to encourage large families.
So did the Spanish system instituted after the civil war. The British
system, being dominated much more by the problem of unemployment,
gave priority to ensuring security for the worker against being out of
work, ill or disabled, to the extent that even old age pensions came to be
administered as, in part, an extension of unemployment relief and
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assistance. The Soviet system was so little concerned about demographic
problems that in 1936 state aid was given to mothers only on the birth
of the seventh child. In 1944, as part of the policy of reinforcing family
life, it was made available on the birth of the third child. The Soviet
Union, however, was much concerned from 1931 onwards with greater
productivity, and aimed to give stronger incentives and higher rewards for
skilled workers and for intensive work. Accordingly social benefits were
made highly individual, and depended on such factors as length of service
in one place and on levels of skill and of production. The United States
Social Security Act of 1935 likewise envisaged widely differentiated
benefits according to previous levels of income of the recipient, rather
than a system of flat benefits or minimum subsistence needs, as in Britain.
It was concerned to guarantee economic security rather than ‘social
security’. General world trends, as usually happened, assumed strong
nationalistic colouring.
In most countries the general increase in national income, and the
larger share of it enjoyed as personal incomes by the middle and the
working classes, were reflected in mounting expenditure on amenities and
luxuries. Coupled with greater leisure, greater affluence produced im-
portant changes in social habits and in economic structure. The whole
structure of industry and business, especially of the distributive trades,
was affected by the expansion of popular demand for consumer goods.
Standardisation of products, qualities and packaging become more com-
mon. Multiple stores multiplied, though so did small shops. The American
firm of Woolworth extended its mass-selling techniques to Britain in 1910
and to Germany in 1927. The French and other western nations then
evolved comparable chain-stores, Prisunic and Monoprix appearing
during the ’thirties. The departmental store originated in France and in
the United States, whence it came to England by the turn of the century
and spread after Gordon Selfridge opened Iris store in London in 1906.
Meanwhile, too, the system of paying for goods on credit, by means of an
initial payment and regular instalments, oddly called in England ‘hire
purchase’, brought the more costly domestic goods such as furniture,
vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and radio within the grasp of working-class
homes.
Expenditure on luxuries inevitably increased in most western countries,
and among the wealthy in eastern countries: on alcohol and tobacco,
confectionery and entertainment, gambling and sports. The silent film
became the most popular of all entertainments in the ’twenties, making
Charles Chaplin a world figure. It gave way from 1929 onwards to the
‘talking film’, and even countries with a low standard of living came to be
lavishly equipped with cinemas, whilst in large towns they became more
palatial ‘super-cinemas’. By 1937 British cinema-goers were spending
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£40 million a year. Italy had some 9,000 cinemas with seating accommoda-
tion for 3i million people; Spain nearly 4,000 with seats for 2 millions.
Dancing became more broadly popular, especially amongyoung people, and
from Europe Britain imported the palais de danse, rivalling in its garishness of
style (though not in extreme popularity) the equally ‘palatial’ new
cinemas. The growth of commercialised sport of all kinds, together with
new facilities for betting and gambling, produced such novelties as racing
greyhounds after a mechanical hare (begun at Manchester in 1926), the
totalisator for horse-race betting (introduced into England in 1928) and,
leading favourite of mass gambling in the ’thirties, the football pools. By
1937 as much was spent on the pools in Britain as on cinema-going: after
the war, much more was so spent, as new forms of mass entertainment
dethroned the cinema from its inter-war supremacy.
The insatiable appetite of the masses for spectacular entertainment,
exceeding even that for sensational news, led to two of the most significant
phenomena of twentieth-century society: the popular press and the cult of
sport. Their parallel and often interconnected growth emphasises several
intrinsic features of social change: the immense importance of ‘publicity’
in modern society, the inherent tendency to commercialise all activities
which have a mass interest, the pervasive force of politics in society,
and the nationalistic, even chauvinistic, potentialities of all mass appeals.
In several ways it was France which led the way in the establishment of a
popular daily press in Europe on the scale achieved in the twentieth
century. In 1905 Le Petit Parisien sold 1,200,000 copies, and taken to-
gether it and Le Petit Journal, Le Journal, Le Matin and L’Echo de Paris
reached some 5 million readers. The most popular daily press in Britain
(as distinct from the Sunday prfcss, which had always set the pace in mass
circulations) did not achieve so large a public until the 1930s, and then
did so by high-pressure salesmanship stunts, such as free insurance and
free gifts for ‘registered readers’. The German press was more avowedly
political and more fragmented: in 1914 the Social Democrats alone had
no daily newspapers whose total circulation was nearly ii million. The
Italian press was normally of less importance, either socially or politically,
though the northern cities had a few influential daily papers. The modem
press with a mass circulation depends on a combination of several
different factors : a modem technology of cheap and quick rotary printing;
a speedy and efficient news-collecting service; almost universal literacy;
organisation for speedy distribution over virtually the whole country; and
— a crucial factor — a very substantial revenue from commercial advertis-
ing. The latter alone made it possible to sell papers cheaply enough for any
working man to afford to buy his own copy. The modem newspaper is at
once the product and the main vehicle of mass publicity.
Existing mainly on this basis, however, most of Europe’s popular
press, as well as much of its less commercialised and less popular press, was
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strongly political in attitude or even in ownership. In France there was a
powerful tradition, from the first, that most papers were avowedly
favourable to a political party or, at least, to the left, centre or right arcs
of the political hemicycle: and leading politicians, a Clemenceau, Jaures
or Blum, came to be identified with the editing and writing of particular
papers and journals. In Britain, too, popular papers were identified with a
particular hue of politics or, as with the Northcliffe and Beaverbrook
press, with the political views of the press baron who owned them. In
Germany, Italy, Spain and most other countries similar affiliations grew
up, even when mass circulations were clearly achieved by appealing to
interests remote from politics, such as sporting news and comment and
magazine features designed for women or children. The mass press,
thriving most on sensational news and crises of acute national concern,
usually tended also to be chauvinistic, presenting events abroad in a tone
of excitement or alarm, handling issues of foreign policy from a patriotic
man-in-the-street’s point of view. During the competition in armaments
before 1914, the more sensational press in each country kept alive the
mood of alarm and fear which supported the arms race.
The evolution of sport showed precisely similar characteristics. It, too,
changed from a selective social activity to a mass spectacle and a highly
commercialised entertainment. Attendance of large crowds at sporting
events was made possible by the erection of large modern stadia with
electrical amplification and flood-lighting. The first modem Olympic
Games were held in Athens in 1896, the Davis Cup was donated in 1900,
the World Cup was first conceived in Paris in 1904, the Tour de France
dated from 1903, the French Grand Prix from 1902, the Tourist Trophy
Race from 1905. It was around the turn of the century that national and
international tournaments of this kind came into fashion, and the vogue
spread to practically all other sporting activities. With the internal com-
bustion engine speed became a new challenge on land and sea and in the
air. When so much money was involved sport became highly commercial-
ised, for ‘ promotion ’ on so large a scale required investment of large sums.
It also, therefore, became highly professionalised. Efforts of the Inter-
national Olympic Committee and of many separate national associations
to preserve ‘amateur status’ led to considerable snobbery, hypocrisy,
absurdity, recurrent controversy, and eventual failure. In the 1920s
Mr John Kelly could not win the Diamond Sculls because he was a
bricklayer, and so was disqualified as a ‘manual worker’: yet he won
Olympic titles and became a millionaire, and his daughter, later made
famous as a film-star, married Prince Rainier of Monaco. Records were so
continually broken that nobody could sensibly compete without becoming
so dedicated a trainee as to be in effect a ‘pro’. Sport, and the attendant
habit of betting, became so prevalent that none of the mass media could
ignore it. News-reel films, radio programmes, as well as the press,
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necessarily devoted considerable attention to it. Special sporting papers,
and professional sports correspondents and commentators, came into
existence; sports champions rivalled film-stars as popular idols. Women
claimed a place of eminence in certain sports, as in other social activities.
As entertainment for the crowd sport might be a leisure-time occupation;
for the most publicised participants it early ceased to be a pastime.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century, which saw the expansion of
European civilisation throughout the world, saw also the propagation of
European games throughout the world, especially by the British. Cricket
did not catch on in the United States or Denmark, but football, lawn
tennis and golf proved to be transplantable, most of all football. It has been
suggested that mass attraction to sport reflects peculiar psychological needs
of an industrial urban society.
It is chiefly through sport (at any rate in peace time) that male industrial workers
can submerge themselves, if only as roaring spectators, in the communal will that
‘their’ team, the group with which they are identified, should win. . .It is possible to
see the teams as organic communities, to let the imagination follow and endlessly
discuss the fortunes alike of the group and of its component heroes, who provide a
vicarious contact with the wild, the unforeseen, the forces of Nature. . .It is signifi-
cant that the word ‘style’ is used of these activities, as of all the arts; a pointer to-
wards the fact that sport should in truth be recognised as the folk art of industrial
communities in particular and of urban society in general. 1
Certainly sport in its mass forms serves well the ends of nationalism.
The originator of the Olympic Games, the Baron de Coubertin, planned
that only individual performers should win; it soon became the custom to
speak of America, England or Russia ‘winning’ certain events. This was
largely due to the sporting press, which depicted it in such terms to the
public of each country. The alleged ‘internationalism’ of sport has
therefore usually involved contests between national teams, however
‘friendly’, rather than between individuals divorced from any national
context. It is no coincidence that the modem dictators invariably utilised
sport as a vehicle of propaganda, to aggrandise themselves and their states
at the expense of others: nor that sports stadia, with the susceptible mass
audience prepared by community singing, parades, bands and the other
trappings of sporting spectacles, became the favourite setting for party
rallies, whether of the National Socialists in Germany or of the Communist
party in Russia. That the sporting prowess of a few individuals out of
many millions should be regarded as evidence of national virility and
strength would be itself merely idiotic, were it not that the most powerful
modem governments have assumed responsibility for choosing, training
and financing national teams to win international contests. Governments
and public opinion have been persuaded that pride, prestige and influence
1 Renee Haynes in A. Natan (ed.), Sport and Society: A Symposium (1958), pp. 60-1.
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are at stake in such contests. This could hardly have come to pass had not
major national events become a folk ritual : as evidenced in the English
Cup Final ritual at Wembley with the crowd reverently singing Abide with
me, and the tendency for all such occasions to become as stylised as is
bull-fighting in Spain. Here, perhaps, is the final comment on the trans-
formation of social life in the twentieth century. Equally manifest in
societies of east and west, of fascism and communism, democracy and
dictatorship, capitalism and socialism, here is a trend which transcends all
regional, national and ideological differences, because it combines irresist-
ibly the strongest commercial, political, social and cultural tendencies of
the age.
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CHAPTER III
THE WORLD ECONOMY:
INTERDEPENDENCE AND PLANNING
T here were so many changes in economic structure and relationships
during the first half of the twentieth century, so many vicissitudes
of fortune both for national communities and for social groups
within them, that long before the outbreak of the second world war in
1939 it was clear that there could be no return to the theory and practice
of international economic interdependence as both were understood in
the world before the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Although
subsequent changes since 1939 — and more particularly since 1950 — have
in some respects been even more drastic, there was such a sharp contrast in
experience between the world before 1914 and the world after 1914 that
contemporaries found it difficult to adapt themselves to new circumstances
or to meet the challenge of new problems.
Before 1914, important economic changes, like the growth of the in-
dustrial power of the United States or the development of new technologies
based on steel and electricity, took place within a system of specialisation
which did not change as a whole: mutability in particulars seemed to be
consistent with general stability. After 1918, serious maladjustments in the
internal economies of the European countries, along with boom and
slump of unprecedented dimensions in the United States, involved such
dislocations and shocks to the international economy that there was a
tendency to idealise the state of affairs before the debacle. At the same
time critics were emerging who pointed to serious limitations and short-
comings. There were certainly substantial divergences of experience be-
tween different countries and between different years in the period before
the outbreak of the first world war; 1 and while it is true that there then
‘existed a much more closely-knit world community than today . . . only a
very small part of the world belonged to it, as it excluded the larger part of
mankind’. 8
Such new interpretation takes into the reckoning the development of
new economies, the emergence of new states and the expression of new
aspirations ; it also rests on an evaluation not only of the mechanisms of
economic interdependence but of the forces making for ‘planning’ within
and across economies. ‘Interdependence’ and ‘planning’, indeed, are
1 S. Kuznets, Capital in the American Economy (Princeton, 1961); W. A. Lewis and
P. J. O’Leary, 'Secular Swings in Production and Trade, 1870-1913’ (The Manchester School
of Economic and Social Studies, vol. xxiii, 1955).
* G. Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State (London, 1958), p. 103.
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twentieth-century themes which sometimes look to be completely separate
and at other moments of time seem to converge. In the gloomy aftermath
of the first world war, one of the outstanding economists of the 1920s and
1 930s, J. M. Keynes, whose views on the possibilities of conscious economic
control were radically to reshape economic policies after 1939, dwelt in
retrospect both on the ‘interdependence’ and the ‘automatism’ of the
pre-1914 system. In a well-known passage he wrote eloquently in 1920
of the ‘extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man’ that came
to an end in 1914. Before 1914
the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in
bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and
reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same
moment and by the same means venture his wealth in the natural resources and new
enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without execution or even trouble,
in their prospective fruits and advantages ... He could secure forthwith, if he wished
it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate, without pass-
port or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a
bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could
then proceed abroad to foreign quarters without knowledge of their religion,
language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider
himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most
important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent,
except in the direction of further improvements, and any deviation from it as
aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. 1
Keynes appreciated without admiring. There was no nostalgia in his
approach, for he also went out of his way to stress * the intensely unusual,
unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation’ by which
western Europe lived. Others, like the influential British Cunliffe Committee
of 1918, which recommended that the overriding aim of British economic
policy in the post-1918 world should be to return to the gold standard at
the pre-war parity, overlooked many of the factors which Keynes took
into account in his analysis. So too did most informed ‘orthodox’
opinion. Implicit in Keynes’s analysis were many fundamental questions
about the pre-1914 ‘system’. Which inhabitants of London behaved or
could behave in this way? Why did some areas of the world outside
Europe remain undeveloped? What was the price of ‘dependency’,
particularly for primary producing countries? If all deviations from the
system were thought to be ‘avoidable’, what of the fluctuations within it,
some of which were socially as well as economically disturbing, not least
in the ‘advanced’ countries? Was it sufficient to ‘blame’ the war, an
exogenous factor, for all the strains and tensions that arose after it? Did
not the change in the strategic position of Britain, around which late
nineteenth-century international trade was organised, begin well before
1 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1 920), p. 10.
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1914, as did the growth of the United States economy, so that war, at
most, accelerated processes which were already traceable? Some of these
questions were already being asked before 1939, a few of them by critics
of the ‘system’ even before 1914; others have been asked — in differ-
ent tones of voice — since the second world war produced not only
new dislocations but new approaches to the best way of dealing with
them.
What is beyond dispute is that the international economy before 1914
was a product of nineteenth-century experience : it was unique as well as
mortal. 1 It rested on the continuing growth of population in Europe; the
free migration overseas in increasing quantities of both men and capital ; the
spread of machine industry mainly in western Europe but also, after 1870,
in the United States and Japan; the development of an intricate network
of communications, banking and insurance services ; and the expansion,
through specialisation, of multilateral trade. The combination of these
forces, each with its own history, accounted for the special economic
characteristics of the period from the late nineteenth century to 1914. It
was in the late eighteenth century that the United Kingdom had in itiated
some of these changes, thereby securing a lead which later turned into a
handicap, and it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that other
countries, following different paths, ‘ caught up ’ or went ahead. 2 Germany,
in particular, after its unification in 1871, began to challenge the United
Kingdom as the principal industrial power in Europe. Russia, the
population of which rose from 77 million in 1870 to 1 1 1 million in 19x4,
had its first industrial revolution during the 1890s — with improved
communications, particularly railways, playing a crucial role. The Euro-
pean railway network as a whole increased from 140,000 miles in 1890 to
213,000 in 1914.
Although the birth rate in western European countries (except Holland)
was falling during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the
largest proportionate population increases in the continent were taking
place in the less developed south and east, the more industrialised west
European countries took increasing advantage of the fact that they had
been able to concentrate capital and labour on relatively small amounts of
land with a high population density. Between 1900 and 1913 their
industrial production increased by about a half.® Their specialised in-
dustrial populations, living at a relatively high standard of life, called for
increasing supplies of food and raw materials which could only be ob-
tained by fostering the primary industries of overseas countries and by
1 See W. Ashworth, A Short History of the International Economy (London. 1962 ed.),
p. 217.
* See A. Gersc'nenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge,
Mass., 1962).
* Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Industrial Statistics,
1900-1962 (Paris, 1964).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
creating new transport services to move their products. During the last
twenty years of the nineteenth century huge new regions of primary
production were opened up — on a much greater scale than ever before —
some of them dealing in new products, like rubber (Malaya and the
Dutch East Indies), others in minerals and chemicals (Chile, Canada and
the Congo), in cereals (Canada and the Middle West), fruit (South
Africa), sugar (Cuba and Java) and meat (Australia, New Zealand and
Argentina). Offices in London or Hamburg or Rotterdam controlled
developments in Singapore or Shanghai or Santiago.
This was the geographical relationship; and in economic terms also the
industrialised countries, which drew on cheap overseas labour but sup-
plied the necessary capital and enterprise, found themselves able, in the
last twenty years of the century, to sell the products of their industry and
to buy primary products from overseas at very favourable terms of trade.
Between 1900 and 1914 the terms of trade moved in the opposite direction,
as the quantum of world trade in manufactured goods doubled while that
of primary products increased by only two-thirds. Yet so great was
European investment overseas in this period (about £350 million each
year) that the trend was on the way to being reversed again as war broke
out. This, then, was a world economy in which Europe was at the centre of
economic power; and within Europe three countries— the United King-
dom, Germany and France — accounted in 1913 for more than seven-
tenths of Europe’s manufacturing capacity. In an age of coal and steel
technology, these three powers produced 93 per cent of Europe’s coal,
78 per cent of Europe’s steel and 80 per cent of Europe’s machinery. 1
The United States had a far higher annual growth rate from 1870 to
1913 (4 3 per cent) than the United Kingdom (2-2 per cent), Germany
(2 9 per cent from 1871) or France (i-6 per cent), and had moved ahead of
Europe both in the mechanisation of agriculture and in the output of coal
(producing 42 per cent of the world’s supply), steel (41 per cent), and
manufactures. Yet, because of its huge and expanding home market, it
played a far smaller part than Europe in international trade. Sixty per cent
of world exports of manufactured articles originated from the three leading
European countries in 1913, and in the United Kingdom, in particular,
the structure and organisation of industry — like the organisation of the
money and capital markets — were geared to world trade. The British
textiles industry, with its overseas sources of supply and its large overseas
markets, was bigger than that of France and Germany combined, and
Japanese competition had not as yet undermined its confidence. London —
1 For these and other figures, see and compare League of Nations, Industrialization and
Foreign Trade (Geneva, 1945); I. Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European
Economy (Geneva, 1954); C. Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (3rd ed. London,
I957)> R- Nurkse, Patterns of Trade and Development (Uppsala, 1959); A. Maddison,
Economic Growth in the West (New York, 1964); and A. Maizels, Industrial Growth and
World Trade (Cambridge, 1963).
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to a far greater extent than Paris or Berlin — was a world financial centre
more than it was a national investment centre. Moreover, the services
which it provided were dependent on a far more extensive trade than that
which concerned the United Kingdom alone, either as an importer or an
exporter, or the ‘formal’ Empire based on London. The financial in-
stitutions of ‘the City’ had world- wide connections, and supplied long-
term capital through the new issues market and short-term capital through
the bill market. Sterling acted as a common trade currency, and the cheap-
ness and security of London’s financial services encouraged regular and
expanding international dealings.
Although it was becoming clear to far-sighted observers that the
world’s economic future would be determined in large measure by what
happened in the United States, Europe still seemed to be firmly placed at
the centre of international society. Even the great growth of American
population was still being fed by large-scale immigration from Europe:
eight and three-quarter million immigrants, indeed, entered the United
States from Europe in the decade from 1900 to 1910, a majority of them
from the south and east of Europe. These ‘ uprooted outsiders ’ were laying
the foundations of a new society: they were also providing the manpower
for a new economy, with a high rate of growth of output per head of
population, higher wages and shorter working hours than in Europe, and
more emphasis on new industries and on consumer goods. Yet neither the
transformation of American life under fierce business pressure nor the
industrial development of Japan under political direction— the number
of Japanese machine looms increased from 19,000 to 123,000 in the decade
before 1914— overshadowed Europe’s role.
Again, it was possible to see in partial perspectives at the time what can
now be seen clearly in retrospect — that over a long period the share of the
United Kingdom in expanding world trade was declining (19 per cent in
the years 1880-5; 14 per cent in the years 1911-13); that its position in
certain export markets— South America, for example — was weakening in
face of United States competition; that its industrial activity depended too
much on ‘traditional’ nineteenth-century staples ; that in steel as well as in
‘new industries’ its rivals were already ahead, with Germany, which
gained greatly after 1871 from the acquisition of the ores of Lorraine,
producing double Britain’s output; that the decline in its agriculture
(during a period of European agricultural development) entailed a huge and
irreducible import bill for food; that, in short, its balance of payments
position was vulnerable and its viability and resilience were in doubt.
While there were enormous capital exports during the decade before 1914,
payments for imports were always greater than current earnings from the
sale of both goods and services. The long-term prosperity of the United
Kingdom obviously depended heavily on the possibility of maintaining a
large and growing income from interest payments overseas and on the
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
rapid exploitation of new territories. Even had there been no war between
1914 and 1918 to diminish the United Kingdom’s foreign assets, it is
likely that the collapse of the pre-1914 boom would have had serious
effects on the structure of the world economy.
Yet it is dangerous to exaggerate. In relation to the world economy
before 1914, it was the United Kingdom which acted, in another phrase of
Keynes, as ‘the conductor of the orchestra’. 1 Some of its ‘weaknesses’,
indeed, assisted the smooth running of the system. As the world’s largest
creditor country, the United Kingdom did not exploit its position to
accumulate such large stocks of gold that it could drain the resources of
other countries within the gold standard system. The payments transfers
it managed — with the minimum of fuss — always allowed debts incurred
by other countries in one area to be cancelled by credits earned in other
areas. In this way, economic benefits were widely diffused and frictions
reduced. The key equations of multilateralism were that the United King-
dom itself had a credit balance in its dealings with the primary producing
countries, and that they settled their balance of indebtedness by an export
surplus to the continental industrial countries and to the United States.
The continental countries in their turn financed import surpluses with the
primary producing countries and with the United States by export
surpluses to the United Kingdom.
It was less the existence of the monetary mechanism of the gold standard
or the ‘rules’ by which it operated than those conditions in which it was
applied which maintained, although then never perfectly, world stability
before 1914. Bank of England gold reserves rose from the mid- 1890s,
and there was a margin of comfort. Small countries were able to rest
content, therefore, with keeping their rates of exchange around par in
relation to London and not concerning themselves too much with the
details of the functioning of an international financial system. 2 As far as
capital was concerned, while political considerations influenced the volume
and direction of both French and German capital movements, no political
obstacles were ever placed in the way of free export of capital from London:
in the seven years before 1914, for example, £600 million of British capital
was provided for the construction of railways in countries, whatever their
political system, which supplied Britain with foodstuffs and raw materials.
Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, indeed, the United
Kingdom annually invested a sum almost equivalent to the total current
receipts in interest and dividends which it earned from accumulated
overseas holdings of capital. 3
1 J. M. Keynes, Treatise on Money (London, 1930), vol. fi, p. 307.
2 R. S. Sayers, Bank of England Operation, 1890-1914 (Oxford, 1930); P. B. Whale,
‘The Working of the Pre-War Gold Standard’, reprinted in T. S. Ashton and R. S. Sayers
(eds.), Papers in English Monetary History (Oxford, 1953).
3 For details see A. K. Cairncross, Home and Foreign Investment, 1870-1913 (Cambridge,
1953 )-
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Free movements of capital, stable exchange rates, and the ‘legal order’
provided by the gold standard (some, not only Englishmen, came to think
of it as a moral order) facilitated international commodity trade. In that
trade also, the special features of the United Kingdom position, including
its ‘weak’ features, facilitated multilateralism. The United Kingdom’s
dependence on imports — in 1913, 63 per cent of its imports came from
outside Europe — gave a fillip both to development and to trade; and
within Europe itself not only did a number of European countries, like
Denmark, look naturally towards London, but Germany, the United
Kingdom’s main industrial rival, was also a major source of supply of
manufactured materials, like chemicals and dyestuffs (as well as a good
customer for British products). Throughout the period before 1914 the
United Kingdom remained ‘dedicated’ to free trade, resisting all counter-
arguments alike, whether they were based on reciprocity, on the importance
of protecting threatened or new industries, on the need to increase
domestic employment, or on the appeal for imperial preference. It also
resisted pressure of vested interests, by falling back, usually fervently, on
what in the course of less than a century had become fundamental liberal
orthodoxy. In consequence, the free and open British market served by
experienced wholesalers, brokers and bankers, and untouched by politi-
cians, drew upon a large proportion of the world’s total exports of staples
and during business crises usually succeeded in absorbing all temporary
surpluses.
The conception of a ‘ legal ’ or ‘ moral ’ order behind this intricate pattern
of interdependence was challenged most articulately before 1914 at
moments of business recession, as in the years 1907-8, when there were
sharp downswings in the volume of economic activity and unemployment
rose. 1 The United Kingdom suffered more from these downswings than
Germany or France, and the United States, despite its more rapid rate of
growth than Europe, also had more violent recessions. It is possible,
however, to trace more persistent sources of discontent and disturbance.
The tacit assumptions on which the system of interdependence was based
concerned both the relationship of countries to each other and of govern-
ments to their peoples. The separation of economics and politics, reflected
in the limited extent to which politicians interfered with international
economic specialisation, depended largely upon the social framework
and social pressures inside their countries. Businessmen were a highly
organised group, even when pre-industrial values, inimical to ‘ acquisition’
or to ‘enterprise’, persisted in national cultures. Politicians constituted an
elite , even when they drew support from mass parties. Orthodox liberal
economic theory, although it was not universally accepted, rested on the
1 Sec W. L. Thorp, Business Annals (New York, 1926). Out of seventeen countries
examined by Thorp, fifteen experienced a recession in 1907/8.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
independence of the market. The ‘dependence’ of Africa and Asia on
Europe was usually taken for granted.
Yet in the midst of this ‘interdependent’ world, there were forces
pulling in a different direction. Most governments before 1914 found it
increasingly necessary to interfere in economic relations both internally
and externally. There were some spheres of economic organisation, like
foreign investment, central banking and railways, which had important
and obvious political and strategic implications encouraging governments
to follow deliberate policies; there were also some governments which for
reasons of tradition or exigency actively set out to intervene in economic
processes. In consequence, while there was no attempt before 1914 to
plan economies as a whole, there were many attempts to plan within
economies or to regulate certain of their sectors. While there was no
direct formulation of national policies to secure and maintain full employ-
ment, there was a growing interest in budget policy as a means of social
adjustment. While quantitative import restrictions had not been developed,
tariffs were freely employed. While the United Kingdom stood firmly by
the principles of free trade, by 1900 45 per cent of its exports went to
protectionist countries, and some of these, like Germany, conceived of
tariffs as instruments of general national policy.
Thus, the historical origins of twentieth-century interventionism may be
discerned in the interdependent pre-1914 world, and a conjunction of
forces, most of them deriving from nineteenth-century sources, was
responsible for the pattern of events. The first moves within economies
began with the uneasiness of some of the privileged and the attack of some
of the underprivileged on the inequalities of income distribution, the
impersonalism of market forces, the cycle of family poverty and the
conditions of industrial work. The extension of the suffrage was followed,
or in some cases anticipated, by popular demand for a shortened working
day and for increased social security. France, for instance, limited the
working day to ten hours in 1900 and the working week to six days in
1906; Austria, following long after the United Kingdom, introduced
factory inspectors in 1883 and a new industrial code in 1907. The victories
of liberal democracy, however limited they were, always encouraged
mass pressures. Some of their effects can be noted in the substitution of
government spending policies for those based on retrenchment finance. 1
In 1908 Lloyd George could say that no one need be afraid of any
taxes being taken off in his time, and a year later Winston Churchill,
then a ‘new Liberal’, could declare that if he had to sum up the im-
mediate future of democratic politics in a single word he would choose
‘insurance’.
1 See, for example, A. T. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in
the United Kingdom (London, 1961); U. K. Hicks, British Public Finances, Their Structure
and Development, 1880-1952 (London, 1954).
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The early stages in the gradual transformation of Lassalle’s ‘night
watchman state’ into the twentieth-century ‘welfare state’ can be traced
in many parts of Europe before 1914. The motives, as usual, were mixed.
Traditionalist paternalism, suspicious of the consequences of the growth
of autonomous markets, might blend with progressive theories based on the
need to secure more equal citizenship. Social insurance might offer right-
wing groups the prospect of achieving political insurance. British insurance
was by no means the first of such ventures on the part of governments.
The German system of social insurance, inaugurated by Bismarck in 1881
and crowned in 19 11 by the promulgation of a Workmen’s Insurance
Code of nearly 2,000 articles, the Reichsversicherungsordnung, began in
part as an attempt to ‘save’ the German working classes from ‘the siren
song of socialism’. By 1914 there were more or less elaborate and compre-
hensive social insurance systems in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium,
Holland, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Sweden arid Switzerland.
Social insurance was the spearhead of spending policy, even when it was
financed out of contributions rather than directly from taxes, and when it
was accompanied by the growth of ‘ trade boards ’ and the introduction of
‘ labour exchanges ’ it implied increasing state concern with the functioning
of the labour market.
Yet if some moves towards greater interventionism within economies
came from the demands of the underprivileged, others came from
business circles themselves. The demand for protection was universal in
the years from 1890 to 1914, although whether or not or to what extent it
was conceded depended on local circumstances. A Swiss referendum in
1891 produced a vote in favour of higher duties; Swedish farmers secured
a return to protection in their country in 1894; and in 1897 the German
emperor suggested to Tsar Nicholas II, with no success, a general Euro-
pean Customs Union to protect Europe against United States competi-
tion. Everywhere economic rivalries — inside countries as well as between
them — encouraged the imposition of tariffs. In some ‘new countries’ —
Australia, for example — the relationship between industrialisation, invest-
ment and protection (labour politicians supported all three) was being
underlined on party platforms. Tariffs, indeed, were conceived of in some
countries not only as concessions to vested interests but as symbols of
autonomy and as necessary instruments in the creation of national
systems of political economy, free from the taint of Manchesterthum.
Along with tariffs, in some countries at least, went cartels and business
concentration. While the United States produced trusts, like the United
States Steel Corporation (1901), huge business organisations pioneered by
‘titans’, who have subsequently been heralded as the true pace-makers of
planning, Germany produced market-sharing cartels, among them the
Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, created in 1893 and controlling
half the coal production of the country, and the Stahlwerkverband,
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controlling almost the whole of steel production, in 1904. In France, where
small business remained strong, the Comite des Forges was virtually con-
trolled by six major firms. In all these cases big business was becoming a
‘system of organised power’. 1 In the United States, by 1904, trusts con-
trolled two-fifths of the manufacturing capital of the country, while in
Germany there was a continuous line of development from private
cartellisation and government assistance given to cartels before 1914 down
to the ‘economic planning’ by the state (within a business framework) in
the 1930s. Before 1914 many German economists already conceived of
the state as the central regulator of the economic life of the community —
a fact duly noted by the American institutional economist, Thorstein
Veblen — and of business as the model of efficient organisation. During the
first world war, in Germany and in the United States, as elsewhere, includ-
ing the United Kingdom, state control had to be exercised through the
mediation of businessmen and business organisations, and Walter
Rathenau, who did much to build up the war-time economic apparatus of
Germany, is reported to have said that he learned all that he knew of
planned economy from his father, Emil, the managing director of the
Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft, founded in 1883. Walter Rathenau
was himself the director of at least sixty-eight business concerns.
It is necessary to trace one branch of the pedigree of ‘planning’ back
to such beginnings. While socialism remained a gospel, the so-called
socialisation of large-scale enterprise was already a fact. Economists have
noted the convergence of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ with a ‘twilight
zone’ of intermediate and transitional forms, 2 and as early as 191 1 one of
them argued forcefully that the future of democracy depended upon its
success in dealing with the problems of public ownership and regulation.®
Certainly the growth of scale and the increasingly monopolistic structure
of industry led to increasing scepticism about the relevance of classical
theories of the market in twentieth-century conditions. It was clear that
such scepticism, along with dissatisfaction with private ownership coupled
with central control, would generate new schemes for control in the name
of the community.
A third pedigree of ‘planning’ — through the discontents of dependent
or ‘colonial’ societies — cannot be clearly traced back before 1914/ al-
though just as the socially and economically privileged within ‘advanced’
1 R. A. Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York, 1943).
2 A. H. Hansen, Economic Stabilization in an Unbalanced World (New York, 1932 ),
p. 329. See also J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (4th ed. London,
1950); J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire (1924), reprinted in Essays in Persuasion
(London, 1931); A. Berle and G. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property
(New York, 1932).
3 F. W. Taussig, Principles of Economics (London, 191 1 ed.), vol. n, p. 41 1.
4 Yet in 1906, after a bumper coffee crop, the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil decided to
buy back part of the crop, hold it off the market and dispose of it at a more favourable
season, an early example of ‘valorisation’.
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communities might sometimes anticipate criticisms which were later taken
up by mass movements, so inside ‘advanced’ countries the critique of
certain facets of ‘imperialism’, including its inequalities, was well de-
veloped by 1914. Critics in the United Kingdom, with the greatest and
richest of the pre-1914 overseas empires, were most vociferous and
influential, notably J. A. Hobson, whose Imperialism, later to be used by
Lenin, was published in 1904. Yet, although there was much discussion of
the statistics of ‘exploitation’ during the decade before 1914, and dramatic
‘facts’ relating to problem areas of development, like the Belgian Congo,
received much public attention, when war broke out in 1914 it was not in
any sense a war about ‘colonialism’ but rather ‘a civil war within the
partial world community of the rich nations V
During the belle epoque of interdependence, the extent and timing of the
benefits gained by different overseas countries varied greatly. Indian
commerce greatly increased, for example, but Indian industry did not:
entrepots were more likely to develop than factories. South Africa, with
its great mineral wealth and its relatively large white population, was
opened up faster than East Africa. Different countries had different
natural resources to offer — some in greater demand than others on the
world’s markets— and different social traditions, institutions and popula-
tions to encourage or inhibit adaptability and growth. The ‘impact’ of the
West could be disruptive, constructive or more usually, perhaps, both,
with the roads, railways, ports and harbours built during this period,
symbols of enterprise and often triumphs of contractors’ skill, remaining
as valuable economic assets on which subsequent independent economic
development might be based. The employment of Dutch capital in what is
now Indonesia or of American capital in the Philippines provided economic
foundations of this kind.
The one non-white country which made great independent economic
progress before 1914 — Japan — reconciled old traditions and new tech-
niques, making use of elements of enterprise within the indigenous
historic structure (see below, ch. xii). Yet its path of growth had much in
common with that followed earlier by western European countries. Sub-
stantial increases in the relative size of the labour force in manufacturing
were not accompanied at first by any big increase in productivity. This
was secured as machine production, deliberately copied from Europe,
became a matter of routine. Like the United Kingdom, Japan developed
its industrial system on the basis of exports of manufactured goods — this
was the ‘leading sector’ of its economy 2 — and it was favoured in its
exploitation of new markets by the fact that the United Kingdom con-
tinued to pursue a policy of free trade. Textiles were the main export,
1 Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State , p. 109.
* SeeC. P. Kmdleberger, Economic Development (New York, 1958) for models of develop-
ment through foreign trade.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
accounting for 32 per cent of Japan’s total exports in 1900 and in the more
variegated and advanced economy of 1913 for 30 per cent. Between these
same two years, imports of textiles into Japan fell from 20 per cent of total
imports to 5 per cent. The first world war did nothing in Japan to reverse
or to decelerate long-term economic trends : indeed, since it was essentially
a European war, it provided Japanese businessmen, like Japanese
politicians, with new opportunities.
In Europe, however, there was a violent break in the continuity of
economic development in 1914. The structure which had been built up
during the previous century and had seemed to reach its culmination in
the belle epoque was destroyed for ever. That there was little recognition
in 1914 of the kind of bill that would have to be paid added to the horror
of paying it. At first, ‘business as usual’ was the slogan in 1914, and both
Germany and the United Kingdom thought primarily of capturing each
other’s markets. It was only when ‘ knock-out blows ’ proved an illusion
and the war settled down into a prolonged contest involving military
attrition that the extent of the break with the psychology and economics
of pre-1914 years began to be apparent. Another strain in the pedigree of
twentieth-century ‘planning’ — planning for victory or for survival — can
be traced back to the years of naval blockade and of trench warfare, much
of it in the industrialised regions of Belgium and northern France. Once
economics became the controlling factor in war, economies had to be
controlled. The longer the war lasted, the more politicians found it
difficult to reconcile the objective of winning the war with that of main-
taining inviolate the autonomy of private business. Market mechanisms
could not operate unchecked. Yet the transition to controlled systems
was slow and hesitant, not usually the work of deliberate design, but
shaped by the pressures of tightening scarcity and the insatiable needs of
war production. Before 1914 there had been no detailed discussion, even
in Germany, of the special ‘ political economy of war ’. By the time that the
war ended, however, administrators like Van Mollendorff were talking
about Planwirtschaft while businessmen were continuing to sigh for a
return to ‘normalcy’. During the last years of the war an impetus was
given to the demand for socialist planning, particularly when the more
autocratic of the pre-1914 empires began to collapse.
The same essential problems faced all the belligerents in 1914, although
recognition of their existence had to be forced on politicians by emer-
gencies and crises. Large-scale modern wars involve organising the full
employment of all available national resources, allocating them to various
producers not only in the right order of priority but also in the right
proportions at the right times, and in so arranging manpower, fiscal and
financial policies that real resources are transferred rapidly to the war
effort. All these implications of large-scale organised violence were less
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dear in 1914 than they were in 1918, and less clear in 1918 than they were
in 1945. The first world war was full of surprises. The generals could not
;nd it quickly, the factories could not produce sufficient munitions,
dvilians could not be neglected in the distribution of supplies, and
:riteria for dealing with the financial problem bore no resemblance to pre-
svar financial criteria. In trying to wrestle with these problems, govern-
ments faced all kinds of resistances, even resistances within their own
ranks from those committed to doctrines of free trade or individualism.
Although businessmen had to be associated with the framework of control
in most countries, the Politisierung of economic life was not received with
universal enthusiasm. A widely felt sentiment was expressed by Karl
Helfferich, the director of the Anatolian Railway and the Deutsche Bank,
tvhen on being appointed to a new German economic department he
svrote that the office would understand its task better if it returned as soon
is possible to pre-war economic conditions.
It was Rathenau and not Helfferich who was most responsible for
planning the economy of war-time Germany, the first of the belligerents
to accept the challenge of full economic mobilisation. In August 1914
tie was given extensive powers. As a result of his warnings about the
danger of a breakdown in supplies, the war materials department ( Kriegs -
Rohstoff Abteilung ) was set up in August 1914 to deal with conservation,
production of substitutes ( Ersatz ) and planned distribution. By the end of
the year, a whole range of technical offices for basic materials, such as
metals, timber and wool, was in being. Kriegswirtschaftsgesellschaften,
war-work agencies, acted as co-ordinating links between government and
business. In November 1916 all the various branches of centralised
authority were co-ordinated in a Supreme War Office ( Oberster Kriegsamt),
under the direct orders of General Groener, and in December a National
Service Law made all men between the ages of 17 and 60 liable to be
directed into the forces or the factories. The economic system now
operated as a whole under close central direction.
More important even than this new economic structure were the
attitudes it engendered. Rathenau himself claimed that the economic task
was no longer one for individuals but for the whole community. He
envisaged the war not so much as a battle between armies as a struggle
between economic rivals. The final issue in the war, indeed, was not the
victory or defeat of the German army, but the victory or defeat of the
German economy. If the result — through organisation — should be victory,
the task would be to go forward in peace as in war from private to collective
economy, Gemeinwirtschaft.
In the United Kingdom there were less articulate or clear-cut formula-
tions of new doctrines, although there was ample resort to new expedients.
Although many steps were taken to control the economy before the
political crises of December 1916, it was from that date onwards that key
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ministries like those of food and shipping began to function and the small
War Cabinet provided a compact agency for central co-ordination. The
War Cabinet reported that war, and especially the war events of 1917,
had brought about a transformation of the social and administrative
structure of the state, ‘much of which is bound to be permanent’. 1 The
process was cumulative. In the case of munitions, the War Office turned
down a proposal in October 1914 that the government should take over
the big armament firms and run them as a branch of the public service, and
it was not until May 1915 that the Ministry of Munitions was created. In
the same month Albert Thomas was given a similar assignment in France.
The ministry faced difficult problems concerning priorities, allocations,
prices and employment, which it met by extending control both vertically
to cover raw materials supplies and horizontally to cover civilian needs as
well as military requirements. In the organisation of manpower machinery
devised in peace-time for different purposes — the labour exchange, for
example — was used to regulate manpower needs. In the organisation of
food supplies and shipping, steps were slow and less dramatic, but final
ramifications were wide. Market mechanisms could never have accomp-
lished what was urgent and necessary. The Ministry of Food, ‘sup-
pressing private enterprise completely, accomplished what private enter-
prise in this country could never have accomplished’. 2 The Ministry
of Shipping focused attention on the necessity for a national import
policy, which would provide for the needs of the economy as a whole,
from the questions raised and the answers tentatively given to them a
scheme of planning emerged. ‘Hundreds of improvisations originating
in shortages of sand-bags or shells or food, and the more fundamental
scarcities of shipping and manpower had fallen together into a pattern.
Very few people saw them as a pattern: fewer still saw the logic that
informed it.’ 3
That there was a pattern is best revealed by examining the experience
of the one belligerent which failed to build up a satisfactory machinery of
war-time planning — Russia. Within a few months of the outbreak of war
there was an acute shortage of guns and ammunition and insufficient
industrial potential (despite a great pre-war leap) to provide for current
military requirements. By the winter of 191 6 economic disorganisation had
reached an advanced stage. In that year, despite increased war demand,
iron and steel production was down by 16 per cent and coal production
by 10 per cent on the 1914 figures. There was no manpower policy, and the
direction of 37 per cent of the Russian population to the army seriously
crippled what was already an inadequate industrial effort. The food
situation was disastrous. Although in 1916 the government adopted
1 Cmd. 9005 (1918).
2 W. H. Beveridge, British Food Control (1928), p. 338.
2 W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British War Economy (1949), p. 29.
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measures for controlling the grain trade and in March 1917 the new
regime proclaimed the grain trade a state monopoly, there were acute food
shortages, especially in the towns, and there was consequent severe
political discontent. By 1917 it was clear that no further measures taken
from the centre could be effective without a revolutionary impetus to
drive them forward. Allied planning efforts had depended above all else on
consent : planning in the revolutionary Russian situation would have to
depend on force. The solutions the Bolshevik revolutionaries worked out
for meeting problems of prolonged emergency and civil war were to have
an important influence on the history of planning during the post-war
years.
There was one other type of war-time planning which was important at
the time and is interesting in retrospect. To replace the multilateral
market systems of pre-war years, the Allies built up an extensive apparatus
of international economic co-operation. During the early stages of the
war an International Food Com m ission was set up in London in an
attempt to secure an orderly distribution of supplies instead of a com-
petitive scramble. Later developments included the evolution of two main
groups of commodity organisations, one under a Food Council and the
other under a Munitions Council. In addition, the Allied Maritime
Transport Council aimed at applying the same principles of shipping
pooling and allocation which had already been developed by the United
Kingdom. This Council became the hub of the Allied machine of economic
warfare. Yet such international planning involved no usurpation of the
distinctive responsibilities of separate national governments. ‘The inter-
national machine was not an external organisation based on delegated
authority. It was the national organisations linked together for inter-
national work, and themselves forming the instruments of that work.’ 1
When the machinery was destroyed in the holocaust of controls at the
end of the war, all that remained were the separate national economic
policies of the various individual states, and they were inevitably influenced
by demands from business interests anxious to abandon war-time planning
and in the words of the Journal Officiel in France, in December 1918, ‘to
re-establish freedom of business transactions with the utmost possible
rapidity’.
The result of such pressure after 1918 was a general movement against
planning. In the case of both the United Kingdom and Germany, the
governments during the war had captured the commanding heights of the
economy, although they had made little sustained attempt to limit profits
while they regulated production. When the war ended, the collective
purpose which had inspired the creation of the framework of control
disappeared. A brief post-war boom, lasting until 1920, and the sharp
contraction which followed it generated a conventional set of responses.
1 J. A. Salter, Allied Shipping Control (London, 1921), p. 179.
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The boom ‘stirred starved appetites to new and clamorous life’; 1 the
slump destroyed the last vestiges of solidarity, forced conflicts between
labour and capital to the surface, and pushed all the relics of war-time
schemes into the melting pot. Some controls merely lapsed and nothing
was done to renew them; others were deliberately jettisoned. ‘During the
war’, wrote the imperialist liberal Lord Milner, ‘a great deal of thought
and really useful labour had been devoted, not only by the Ministry of
Reconstruction, to making plans for the resumption of peaceful activities
on better lines than those to which we had been accustomed in the past.
In the disorganised scramble which began the moment the war was over,
all these plans went by the board.’ 2 In the international field the United
States, with greatly enhanced economic power, exerted all its influence
behind the drive to abolish inter- Allied control of raw materials. ‘This
government’, wrote Herbert Hoover, ‘will not agree to any programme
that even looks like inter-Allied control of our resources after peace. ’ 3
The result was that not only did bodies like the Coal Control Department
in Britain and the consortiums in France disappear, but bodies like the
Allied Maritime Transport Council were dismantled. The disappearance
of the international agencies made the task of world reconstruction more
difficult. War conditions did not end with the end of hostilities, and
collective disorganisation still called for collective effort. The fact that it
was not forthcoming accentuated many of the problems of the next six
or seven years.
If the machinery of planning was put out of action abruptly and
decisively, it did not disappear without leaving a trace. In many govern-
ments — and in all oppositions — there were people and groups in favour of
continued control of the economy. Mollendorff’s plans in Germany for
continued planning were abortive, but the constitution of the Weimar
Republic laid down a system of workers’ councils and economic councils
with a National Economic Council ( Reichswirtschaftsrat ) at the top of
the pyramid. Although the Council functioned only on a provisional
basis after it came into being in 1920, the idea which lay behind it remained
influential in Germany. 4 Gustav Stresemann, the outstanding figure in the
middle years of the Weimar Republic, was the former chief bureaucrat of a
large industrial organisation. In France, where some attempt was made to
convert war machinery to peace-time purposes, so called ‘ mixed enter-
prises ’, partnerships of private and public capital, were created in the
1920s in industries like oil and petrol (the Compagnie Frangaise des
Paroles), and a new bank, the Credit National, set up to handle compensa-
1 R. H. Tawney, ‘The Abolition of Economic Controls’ ( Economic History Review,
vol. xm, 1943).
* Viscount Milner, Questions of the Hour (London, 1925), p. 24.
3 Quoted in A. Zimmem, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (London, 1938),
p. 157.
* See G. Stolper, German Economy, 1870-1940 (London, 1940).
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tion payments and reconstruction allowances, was given official power to
intervene in management. 1 A National Economic Council was created in
1924 to provide a forum for consultation between industrialists, workers
and consumers, and plans were prepared to develop ‘national equipment’
(• outillage national) in 1926 and 1929. 2
There was one other legacy of war-time experience. When it became
apparent that the world after 1918 was very different from that before
1914, the metaphors of war began to be revived and were employed in the
planning ‘campaigns’ of the 1920s and 1930s. In the Soviet Union,
massive by-product of Russian war dislocation, there continued to be
agrarian and industrial ‘fronts’, ‘battles’ of production, ‘brigade leaders’
in the collective farms and ‘shock’ workers in the factories. In fascist
Italy a ‘Battle of the Grain’ was proclaimed in 1925 ‘to free the Italian
people from the slavery of foreign bread’. In National Socialist Germany
a similar battle of agricultural production was announced in 1934 while
the Labour Front was substituting for the trade unions ‘a soldier-like
kernel’ of labour organisation and extolling the merits of compulsory
labour service. All these schemes attempted to re-create the community of
purpose and solidarity of interests which had made war-time planning
possible: some were directly associated, indeed, with preparation for new
warfare, for during the inter-war years memories of past war and thoughts
about future war frequently overlapped.
The effects of the first world war on the development of planning went
much farther, therefore, than the occasional continuity of institutions or
the rebirth of metaphors. The post-war world, despite the apparent revival
of multilateral trade between 1925 and 1929, was inherently unstable, and
economic relationships within it had changed drastically. Historians may
still argue about the extent to which the war itself was responsible for all
the subsequent shocks and confusions of the inter- war years, particularly
the Great Depression of 1929-32, the economic watershed of the
period. Yet the wastes of war inside Europe, the dislocation of resources,
the shifts of economic and geographical power outside Europe, the
psychological and political transformation inside and outside, the disturb-
ing financial consequences, both domestic and international, of the war
and of the peace settlement were all obvious between 1918 and 1925. And
even between 1925 and 1939, when it seemed that some aspects of the pre-
war system had been ‘ restored ’, there were strains which led on directly
to 1929 and 1931. While the effects of the war cannot be easily separated
from the effects of other contemporary changes — of population, for
example, or of technology — some, at least, of its direct consequences can
1 A. Chazel and H. Poyet, L' economic mixte (Paris, 1963).
s For the significance of this see the official British report by R. Cahill, Economic Condi-
tions in France (London, 1934).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
be measured quantitatively. Moreover, it can be shown more generally,
using the analogy of a pendulum, that the dislocation created by the war
meant such a shock to the economic system that great swings followed,
the greatest of them that of the Great Depression, and continued through-
out the entire inter-war period. 1
The wastes of war and the dislocation of resources had begun with man-
power. It has been calculated that Europe (excluding Russia) lost from
20 to 22 million people as a direct or indirect result of the war, 7 per cent
of its total population, and Russia about 28 millions, 18 per cent. 2
Between 1880 and 1913 the annual increase in Europe’s population had
been 2-3 millions; between 1913 and 1920 total population actually fell
by 2 millions. During the same seven years, European manufacturing
output fell by 23 per cent, while across the Atlantic that of the United
States rose by 22 per cent. 3 European national incomes suffered too, and
the income per head in the three large industrial countries — the United
Kingdom, Germany and France — remained less in the mid- 1920s than it
had been in 1913. Industrial unemployment was a permanent feature of
the economy, even when business revived. Agricultural production in
Germany and France was lower in the years 1924-8 than it had been in
1913, while the output of food and raw materials in Oceania and Asia
rose by 20 per cent between 1913 and 1925, in the United States and
Canada by 25 per cent and in Latin America and Africa by even more.
During the mid- 1920s United States and Canadian grain production was
16-17 per cent more than the annual average of 1900-13. At the same
time, new raw materials, like oil, challenged old European raw materials,
like coal—-crude oil output rose from 327 million barrels in 1910 to
688 million barrels in 1920 and 1,411 million barrels in 1930 — and it was
not until the late 1920s that coal output per man-shift in the United
Kingdom reached the pre-war figure. 4 All in all, it has been estimated in
straight economic terms that there was an eight- year setback to European
industrial development as a result of the war. In the period from 1881 to
1913 European manufacturing output had risen on an average by 3 } per
cent each year. If this rate of increase had been maintained during the war,
the 1928 level of output would have been reached by 1921. 6
Dislocation of resources was revealed at many points in the European
economic system — for example, in transport in the breakdown of the
European railway system and in the war-time over-expansion of the
shipping industry, which led to serious post-war depression — and in
1 Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy, p. 19. For the pendulum
analogy, see R. Frisch, ‘Propagation Problems and Impulse Problems in Dynamic Eco-
nomics’, in Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel (London, 1933).
2 F. W. Notestein and others, The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union
(Geneva, 1944), ch. m.
3 Svennilson, op. cit. p. 18. 4 Ibid. pp. 44-5.
6 W. A. Lewis, ‘World Population, Prices and Trade, 1870-1960’ ( The Manchester
School, vol. xx, 1952).
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excess capacity in iron and steel. The United Kingdom, in particular,
suffered from dislocation of its economic pattern, just as Russia, and, in
western Europe, France and Belgium, suffered most from direct damage;
and by 1918 the proportion of United Kingdom industrial production
which was exported overseas was little more than a half of what it had
been in 1913. Throughout the 1920s stagnation in British staple industries
caused serious concern to businessmen and governments alike, and there
were few compensating gains in new industries. In one of the key nineteenth-
century industries, textiles, closely geared to international trade, Japan
even succeeded in penetrating the British home market. There were other
kinds of dislocation or shift within the European economic pattern,
notably in central and eastern Europe, where powerful large economic
units were broken up and the number of nation states multiplied. Whereas
before 1914 the population of Germany and Austro-Hungary taken to-
gether had substantially exceeded that of the United States, after 1919, of
the twenty-nine European states, only five had more than forty million
inhabitants and ten had less than five million. While market forces made
for continued economic interdependence, political forces were re-
emphasising the importance of sovereignty and of national frontiers. On
ten German finished goods in 1913, the Austro-Hungarian tariff had
amounted to 16-25 per cent. In Hungary in 1927 it was up to 34-54 per
cent, and in 1931 to 42-61 per cent. Further east, partly for reasons of
revenue raising, Rumania and Bulgaria built high tariff walls very
quickly after 1919.
Even more disturbing in the 1920s than dislocation of resources,
tariffs or the re-drawing of boundaries were internal inflation and a
changed international balance of debtor-creditor relationships. Internal
inflation — with prices rising from double to twenty times the pre-war
level — was a general phenomenon, arising out of huge war-time budget
deficits, which reached epidemic proportions first in central and eastern
Europe and then in Germany. The German collapse was particularly
serious. There were 250 German marks to the pound sterling in 1920 — as
against 20 in 1914— and in the last months of 1921 there were 1,000. In
1922 the figure soared to 35,000, and in the early autumn of 1923 the
mark became worthless. Savings were wiped out, social relationships
were seriously disturbed — the experience of inflation was as disturbing for
large sections of the middle class as unemployment was for the workers —
and Germany’s capacity to pay reparations, a ‘War guilt’ payment on
which the Allies insisted as part of the peace settlement, had to be re-
viewed afresh. German financial collapse had been brought about not by
the demand for reparations payments but by deliberate lack of fiscal
responsibility. As a result of the collapse, however, the precarious
relationships between reparations payments and war debts and between
the Allies and the United States had to be re-assessed.
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At the end of the war, all the European Allies were in debt to the United
States, and all the Allies, except the United States, were in debt to the
United Kingdom. Attempts by the United Kingdom in 1919 to have the
war debts cancelled and three years later internationally to reduce the
burden of debt proved unacceptable to both the United States and France;
and the related problem of debts and of reparations (the United States
refused to recognise the relationship) remained a major issue at inter-
national financial conferences until the 1930s.
Official debts and transactions arising out of them were only a part, if
too big a part, of the story. Beneath the surface there were even more
fundamental changes in international debtor-creditor relationships as a
result of the war. United Kingdom foreign investments had fallen by
15 per cent in value between 1914 and 1918, and although by 1929, after a
difficult struggle to restore the pre-war position, they had risen again
above the 1914 level, it seemed to many contemporaries that the frontiers
of investment had contracted and that a dangerous part of the long-term
lending had been financed out of vulnerable short-term funds attracted to
London from overseas. The City of London, still more interested in
international finance than in British industry, was far less strongly placed
internationally than it had been before 1914. In the meantime, the
United States had become both the world’s biggest creditor and its
biggest capital exporter, with American foreign investments rising from
about $2,000 million in 1913 to $15,000 million in 1930, 30 per cent of
them being located in Europe. This may well have been too high a
proportion: far less foreign investment moved into transport or into
productive enterprises in ‘undeveloped’ areas than had been the case
before 1914.
Equally serious, as far as Europe itself was concerned, dependence on
the United States had become a prop of the system. Just as it would have
been impossible to rehabilitate Europe without American assistance
immediately after the end of the war — when the American Relief Associa-
tion supplied food to the value of £29 1 million, only 29 per cent of which
was paid for in cash — so it would have been impossible for European
countries to pay either reparations or war debts, after 1923, without
American loans. German reparations payments under the Dawes Plan of
April 1923 (which brought the German financial crisis to an end) were met
out of American loans, with the net import of capital into Germany
during the period of the plan standing at between twice and three times
the amount of the reparations payments Germany was called upon to pay.
At the same time, limited German reparations payments to the ex-Allies
were used by them to pay their annual war debts to the United States.
‘Reparations and Inter- Allied debts’, wrote Keynes in 1926, ‘are being
mainly settled in paper and not in goods. The United States lends money
to Germany, Germany transfers its equivalent to the Allies, the Allies
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pass it back to the United States Government. Nothing real passes — no
one is a penny the worse.’ 1
The continued existence of the circular flow depended on American
capital, and, although American lending was to prove more jerky and less
reliable than the pre-war British lending which had held the system to-
gether, the American economy seemed strong and resilient in the mid-
1920s. While the United Kingdom was passing through its far from easy
period of underemployment and industrial maladjustment, the United
States was galloping through a roaring boom which carried much further
the economic advances of the first world war, particularly in new in-
dustries with a future, like automobiles, rubber and electricity. Between
1925 and 1929 Europe also shared in much of the prosperity, as the
volume of international trade rose by nearly 20 per cent (because of
falling prices, only 5-5 per cent in value), with world production of food-
stuffs and raw materials increasing by 1 1 per cent and manufactures by
26 per cent. Effective international economic aid to Austria and to
Hungary, somewhat more sensible attitudes both to war debts and to
reparations, and a widespread ‘return to gold’ were other signs of what
optimists felt was genuine economic recovery. Sweden was the first of the
European countries to return to gold in 1924, but most important in
relation to the international economy was the United Kingdom’s return a
year later. (The move was strongly criticised by Keynes, who objected to a
‘return’ and looked for an alternative means of securing interdependence
built on management of ‘the actual system which had grown up half
haphazard since the war’.) 2 Belgium followed in 1927 and Italy in 1928.
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Rumania and Yugo-
slavia adopted a gold exchange standard. Instead of holding gold as the
backing of their currencies, they held claims on gold standard countries
in the form of currency, bank deposits and securities. In such circum-
stances, the gold standard never quite operated in the classic form
orthodox financiers expected of it or claimed that it had operated before
1914, nor were ‘ordinary people brought up regularly against gold’ in
the form of coins as they had done before 1914. The system began to look
suspect. Any serious strain in ‘ full ’ gold standard countries was likely to
disturb gold exchange standard countries. Most countries had too small
a stock of gold in relation to their liabilities. The United Kingdom was
no longer in a position to ‘manage the international system’ on small
gold reserves, while France, which stabilised the franc in 1926, at a level
which undoubtedly upset competitive conditions in international trade,
accumulated more gold than it needed.
Some of these problems could easily be overlooked between 1925 and
1 In the Nation and Athenaeum, 1 1 September 1926.
* See J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill (London, 1925). For a
contrasting view, see R. S. Sayers, ‘The Return to Gold’, in L. S. Pressnell (ed.). Studies in
the Industrial Revolution (London, i960).
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1929, for if the existence of unemployment could not be ignored when
sets of regular statistics appeared (a by-product in some countries of
national insurance), it was often assumed to be a necessary feature of
the system. Hidden from most people’s view were the problems of the
relationship between ‘advanced’ and ‘developing’ countries. Throughout
the 1920s, world prices of food and raw materials remained low in
relation to the prices of manufactured goods, yet there was a continuous
increase of production which led to the accumulation of heavy unsold
stocks. The world stock of wheat, for example, rose during the four ‘ good
years’ from 1925 to 1929 from around nine million tons to more than
twenty million tons. Other international commodities, like sugar or coffee,
which were produced in tropical countries as staple crops with low-
income labour, offered an extremely precarious livelihood to the large
number of individuals producing them. Dissatisfaction with the opera-
tions of the free commodity market was expressed most forcibly in the
1 920s — and later in the 1930s — by monopolistic associations of pro-
ducers, who tried to hold up the price of Canadian wheat or Brazilian
coffee not by reducing output but by withdrawing or destroying stocks;
yet they often received the support of their governments, which feared
contraction of income from foreign trade, when they attempted, usually
in vain, to resist falls in personal incomes. A characteristic example was
the Stevenson scheme for the regulation of rubber prices put into effect in
1922 two years after the British Rubber Growers’ Association in Malaya
had decided to restrict output to cope with falling prices and one year
after the British government had ordered an official enquiry. The scheme
was dropped in 1928, to be succeeded six years later by an inter-govern-
mental scheme, involving the Dutch Empire also.
Expressions of the dissatisfaction of plantation workers with the
operations of the free market were less frequently heard in either colonial
or independent societies than the complaints of business interests. They
were less frequently heard, indeed, than the complaints of consumers in
‘advanced’ countries that whenever crops were destroyed there was, by a
social paradox, ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’. In fact, however, planta-
tion workers were doomed to poverty so long as the patterns of land use
and of farming and the whole economic structures of their countries
remained unchanged. ‘While statisticians juggled with figures for sugar
quotas ’, it was noted in retrospect — and the note applied to many other
primary producing industries besides sugar — ‘and while governments
juggled with beet subsidies, the real cost of the maladjustment in the
sugar market was measured by the sufferings of the Colonial workers
attached to the industry.’ 1 Social and economic problems were in-
extricably interconnected both in the primary producing countries and the
‘advanced’ countries. While primary producers, the more active they
1 P. Lamartine Yates, Commodity Control (London, 1943), p. 53.
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were, received lower incomes in return for their efforts and could not
afford to buy manufactured goods, low-income consumers in ‘ advanced ’
countries, some of them unemployed, could not convert their wants into
effective demand. The fact that many of the manufactured goods being
produced were designed not for developing countries, but for the mass
markets of the developed countries, like the fact that much of the invest-
ment of the period did nothing to change basic economic or social
conditions in the developing countries represented in retrospect, at least,
a failure both of opportunity and of responsibility.
The main reasons why the nature of this set of problems was not fully
appreciated at the time were as much political as economic, although the
fact that most of the highly industrialised countries were able by obtaining
cheaper imports of food and raw materials to maintain, at least relatively,
a strong international economic position and that, despite unemployment,
the real income of their wage-earners increased, made it easier to ignore
general economic vistas and responsibilities. There was, indeed, much less
talk about this set of international economic issues than about the circle
of reparations and war debts.
Between 1929 and 1933 the collapse of the United States economy and
subsequently of many of the European economies provided more than
adequate preoccupations in themselves. The optimism of the years 1925-9
was abruptly shattered by the Wall Street crash of October 1929, reaching
a series of feverish climaxes on 24 October, ‘Black Thursday’; on
29 October, ‘the most devastating day in the history of the New York
Stock Market’ and possibly ‘the most devastating day in the history of all
markets’, 1 when The Times industrial index fell by 43 points; and on three
November days, the 1 1 th, 1 2th and 1 3th, when the index fell by another
50 points. What began so dramatically was followed by the lingering
‘Great Depression’. The recall of American funds from Europe meant
not only a withdrawal of credit but that European banks had to meet
their obligations in gold. There were consequent failures both of nerve
and of institutional technique. The collapse became general, affecting men,
money and materials. Everywhere in Europe and in other economically
dependent parts of the world, like Australia and New Zealand, prices,
output and trade declined rapidly and steeply; unemployment rose to
alarming levels never before reached; international financial obligations
were repudiated; and in most countries policy became concerned primarily
with insulating the national economy from the effects of world-wide
slump. Within a few months of the collapse it was difficult to realise that so
very recently optimists had been convinced that ‘the world as a whole’
was ‘advancing at an unprecedented pace to levels of prosperity never
1 J. K. Galbraith, The Great Crash (London, 1955), p. 105.
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before thought possible’ 1 and in some cases predicting that the prosperity
would go on for ever.
The 1929 American crash was followed not only by persisting hard
times in the United States but less than two years later by financial collapse
in Europe. Large and disturbing movements of short-term capital, ‘hot
money’, had pressed dangerously on national reserves of gold and foreign
exchange, and in some cases capital had moved speculatively from
countries which needed it to countries which could not use it. The
Kreditanstalt in Austria was saved in March 1931 only by advances from
the Bank of International Settlements and foreign banks, including the
Bank of England. Later in the year the crisis moved to Germany, where
there had been both financial and political difficulties since 1928 despite a
generous reorganisation and reduction of reparation payments under the
Young Plan of 1929 which replaced the Dawes Plan. In June and July the
German Reichsbank was in an extremely precarious condition, even after
President Hoover of the United States proposed a one year moratorium on
reparation and war debt payments on 21 June. International action to
save Germany from financial collapse moved the crisis towards the United
Kingdom, where gold was leaving the country at the rate of £i\ million a
day and reserves were becoming ominously low. The fall of the Labour
government in August 1931 and its replacement by a ‘National’ govern-
ment temporarily halted the withdrawals, but by late September
£200 million of gold had been lost in two months. On 21 September
Britain suspended the gold standard, the prelude to a general movement off
gold. By April 1932 twenty-three countries had followed Britain, and in
seventeen others the gold standard was virtually inoperative. The monetary
systems which had been so carefully and proudly rebuilt during the 1920s
had been swept away.
Yet preoccupation with the fortunes of gold was not the most serious
part of the story. The fall in prices was catastrophic. In the United States,
in the sick economy of the 1930s, the Bureau of Labour's wholesale price
index fell from 100 in 1929 to 63 in March 1933, and in the United
Kingdom, which had not been a healthy economy even in the 1920s, the
Board of Trade’s index fell in the same period from 100 to 72. The prices
of primary products, on which the income of the poorer countries of the
world depended, fell even more sharply. The gold price of rubber in
January 1933 was only 13 per cent of what it had been in January 1929,
of wool 22 per cent, of silk 28 per cent, of copper 29 per cent, of cotton
34 per cent, of rice and coffee 41 per cent, of wheat 42 per cent and of
sugar 50 per cent. While there was a reduction in the output of minerals,
the volume of agricultural products did not fall, but the drastic drop
in incomes led to a serious privation and to a sharp contraction in
international trade. Between 1929 and the third quarter of 1932 the value
1 A. Salter, Recovery (London, 1932), pp. 22-3.
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of international trade shrank by more than 65 per cent, while the inter-
national trade of non-European countries fell to less than 30 per cent. In
all the main industrial countries there was a sharp fall of production, a
rise in unemployment, and a decline in exports. Taking 1929 as 100,
United States production in 1932 was 54, that of Germany 53 and that of
France 69. In Britain the figure was 84, but British exports in 1932 were
only 63 per cent of those of 1929. American exports stood at 53 per cent,
and French and German at 59 per cent. 1
In such circumstances, there was recourse to many expedients and im-
provisations, some of them based on the simple maxim of same qui peut,
others on the equally simple maxim of ‘beggar my neighbour’. The
United Kingdom abandoned free trade as well as gold in 1932: by the
Import Duties Act a general 10 per cent tariff was introduced, with
protective duties on some manufactured goods of up to 33^ per cent, and a
year later an attempt was made at Ottawa to form an empire ‘bloc’, the
main effect of which was to raise British tariffs on goods imported from
outside the Empire. For many countries traditional economic instruments,
like tariffs, seemed quite inadequate, and import quotas, control of
marketing of home-produced products, price determination and regula-
tion of capital investment and distribution were adopted. Such deliberate
intervention to influence the operation of the market, however improvised
in its origins, became a permanent feature of national economic policy.
The choice of instruments adopted, like their effectiveness, depended as
much on political as on economic considerations. In Germany, where the
number of unemployed rose to nearly six millions in 1932, the political
tide moved in favour of the National Socialists, who in an atmosphere of
tension and violence promised, certainly not on the basis of a carefully
thought out economic programme, to abolish unemployment and
guarantee national self-sufficiency. In countries like Belgium and Holland,
where business interests were strong, government apparatus was designed
to protect industrial capital and profits: attempts were made in 1932
(only to be blocked by Britain) to form a low-tariff zone in what is now
Benelux. In the ‘green international’ countries of eastern and southern
Europe, particularly hard hit, like primary producing countries outside
Europe, by the fall in food prices, there was special political urgency in the
old argument that agriculture constituted a special case in economics, and
landlord and peasant interests had to be most carefully watched. Yet just
as Britain blocked the agreement between Belgium, Holland and Luxem-
bourg, so Germany and Italy (in 193 1-2) blocked schemes for a Danubian
customs union, this time on straight political grounds. Among the
European countries only in Sweden, when the Social Democrats came
into power in 1932 (in alliance with the Farmers), was there sufficient
1 See League of Nations, The Course and Phases of the Great Depression (Geneva,
1931).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
boldness to rely on unbalanced budgets and loan-financed public works to
achieve ‘a definitely expansionist mentality’. 1 In all the European in-
dustrial countries, however, the full social effects of the depression were
‘cushioned’ to some extent by the fact that they could maintain their
imports of primary products at a relatively high level because of the dis-
proportionately steep fall in import prices. The United Kingdom as the
biggest importer benefited most. The average real income of the person
at work was nearly as great in 1932 as in 1929, and even if the increasing
number of unemployed are included, the average was only 10 per cent
less. 2
The United States, where industrial construction slumped from
$949 million in 1929 to $74 million in 1932, made no effective contribution
to international recovery during these difficult years. In addition to clinging
to war debts, even after the unratified Lausanne Conference of July 1932
put a de facto end to reparations claims, the Americans followed a pro-
tectionist policy in international trade. 3 After the beginning of the
depression the Hawley-Smoot Act of 1930 raised the already high pro-
tective duties imposed by the Fordney-McCumber tariff of 1922. It
provoked a series of retaliatory measures in many parts of the world. ‘ The
debts of the outside world to us ’, wrote the President of the Chase National
Bank in 1930, ‘are ropes about their necks, by means of which we pull
them towards us. Our trade restrictions are pitchforks pressed against their
bodies, by means of which we hold them off.’ 4 Such contradictions
reflected the large extent to which American economic policy was
the product of powerful sectional business pressures.
At the same time, the fact that American farmers and workers were
especially hard hit by the great depression made it inevitable that American
politicians had to put America first, and there were many American
economic ‘nationalists’ uninfluenced by business pressures who by 1933
found ‘extolling the old laissez-faire liberal internationalism ... harder
and harder to bear’. 5 The reality of the position was brutally demonstrated
in April 1933 when after the new President, F. D. Roosevelt, had sent a
stirring message to the world stressing the need for international economic
co-operation the American government abandoned the gold standard and
devalued the dollar by 41 per cent at the very moment that a World
Monetary and Economic Conference — the first and last genuinely inter-
1 B. Ohlin, ‘Economic Recovery and Labour Market Problems in Sweden’, in the
International Labour Review (1935), vol. xxi, pp. 498-501, 670-99.
2 C. Clark, National Income and Outlay (London, 1937 ), p. 208.
3 There was a de facto end to war payments to the United States after 1933, only Finland
making any payments after December of that year.
4 Chase Economic Bulletin, 14 March 1930.
8 R. Tugwell, Notesfrom a New Deal Diary, 31 May 1933 , quoted in W. E. Leuchtenburg,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, 1963), p. 200. ‘The cat is out of the
bag’, wrote Tugwell later. ‘There is no invisible hand, there never was’ ( The Battle for
Democracy, New York, 1935, p. 213).
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national conference to deal with economic problems since 1929 — was
convening in London under the auspices of the League of Nations. De-
valuation was conceived of as a means of raising the American internal
price level and strengthening farm incomes and Roosevelt rejoiced that
the ‘old fetishes of so-called international bankers’ were ‘being replaced
by efforts to plan national currencies’. 1 Yet in so far as it in effect raised
United States tariffs by 60 per cent and gave a 40 per cent bounty to
American exports at a time when America already enjoyed a favourable
balance of trade and was importing gold, it had the effect of further in-
creasing international disequilibrium. After this ‘bombshell’, it was not
surprising that the World Economic Conference failed to reach agreement
either on questions relating directly to currency or on proposals to
increase the volume of international trade. Its main achievement, indeed,
was further to extend or to reinforce international commodity controls of
a restrictive kind in relation to such products as wheat, rubber, sugar, tea,
tin and copper. 2
Yet however unhelpful American policy was in relation to international
recovery, two points of qualification must be made concerning its general
role. First, it is by no means certain that a different American policy
would have made the World Economic Conference a success. The
pressures for independent national action were powerful everywhere, and
there was a universal contradiction between the facts of national economic
policy and the pious hope expressed by bankers and orthodox economists
that ‘the gold standard remains the best available monetary system’. 3
Secondly, President Roosevelt’s apparent distaste for laissez faire, defla-
tion and the adjustment of monetary policies to the vagaries of inter-
national capital movements was echoed in many circles in Europe.
Keynes, for instance, called his actions ‘magnificently right’. His
vigorous actions in going forward to seek to meet the ‘ crisis ’ situation in
his country were seen as a triumph of purpose. There were over 13
million unemployed when he was returned to power, and the ‘New Deal’
which he offered his people to meet this and other economic and social
challenges brought to an end a period of what has been called ‘ suspended
animation’. 4 While there was nothing revolutionary either in the philo-
sophy or the purposes of the New Deal and there were many contradictory
tendencies expressed in it, it received widespread interest in all other parts
of the world, as did related American ‘plans’, like the Tennessee Valley
Authority scheme, introduced in 1933 as an imaginative attempt to
extend planning in the name of a return to the spirit and vision of the
American pioneer.
1 Quoted in Leuchtenburg, op. cit. p. 202.
* See H. V. Hodson, Slump and Recovery 1929-1937 (London, 1938), ch. vi.
* Report of the Gold Delegation (Geneva, 1932), p. 23.
4 H. W. Axndt, The Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties (London, 1944), p. 42.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
The first object of the New Deal was to pull the United States out of the
slump, the second to widen the concept of social justice, and the third to
balance the economic system. None of these objectives — and some of
Roosevelt’s friends as well as his opponents saw them as incompatible —
involved any long-term overall plan, but they all implied increasing
governmental intervention. Undoubtedly the American ‘experiment’,
which had reached stalemate by 1938, after bitter arguments between
different groups of presidential advisers and in face of increasing business
resistance, stimulated great interest in the problems of planning both in
America and in Europe. Alvin Hansen, the economist, might ask whether
‘ government intervention, made inevitable by the distress incidental to
vast unemployment, has created a hybrid society, half-free and half-
regimented, which cannot operate at full employment’, 1 but in Europe the
view was widely held that Roosevelt’s ‘strivings towards reconstruction
and revival are as surely the outstanding example of reformed Capitalism
as the Russian Five-Year Plans are of Socialist planning in the world
today’. 2
While the United States achieved this reputation, Sweden became
known as ‘ the economic miracle ’ of the 1930s, 3 and New Zealand after an
overwhelming Labour victory in 1938 consciously turned itself, despite
international complications, into a ‘welfare state’. 4 It was possible,
indeed, for one well-known British economist to write (without enthusiasm)
in 1934, ‘we may not all be socialists now, but we are certainly (nearly)
all planners ’. 5 In retrospect, even given the American, Swedish and New
Zealand experience, the remark seems exaggerated. There was still far
less planning of economies than political interference within economies,
and there was no general understanding of the economics of unemploy-
ment, despite the publication in 1936 of Keynes’s General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money, which is one of the great twentieth-
century landmarks in the history of economic thought. When ‘planning’
was discussed in the United Kingdom, which it often was, it did not entail
more than strictly limited ‘management’, usually to meet the particular
problems of specific industries by destroying excessive capacity and stocks
or by ‘rationalising’ prices. ‘Planning is forced upon us’, wrote a young
Conservative politician, H. Macmillan, in 1938, who on other occasions
talked grandiloquently of ‘an organic conception of society’ as a
counterweight to ‘individualism and laissez-faire ’, 6 ‘not for idealistic
1 A. H. Hansen, Full Recovery or Stagnation (New York, 1938), p. 8.
2 G. D. H. Cole, Practical Economics (London, 1937), p. 145.
5 H. Dalton in B. Thomas Monetary Policy and Crises (London, 1936), p. x. See also
M. Childs, Sweden, the Middle Way (London, 1937).
4 J. B. Condliffe, ‘The Labour Experiment in New Zealand’, in The Economic Record,
August 1957, pp. 153-4; W. B. Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand (London,
1942 ).
5 L. Robbins, The Great Depression (1934), p. 145.
8 H. Macmillan, The Spirit of Conservatism (London, 1929), p. 103.
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reasons but because the old mechanism which served us when markets
were expanding naturally and spontaneously is no longer adequate when
the tendency is in the opposite direction.’ 1 The founding of the British
Iron and Steel Federation in 1934, for example, was an example of a
union of protectionism and ‘a considerable measure of reorganisation’ 2
which fell far short of general or even of limited economic planning. The
Agricultural Marketing Act of 1933, which provided for the organisation
of marketing schemes for commodities like milk, potatoes and hops, was
in the same spirit. 3
What was true of the United Kingdom was true of other countries.
Italian fascist economists could write of corporativismo as a new order
in which the distribution of labour and capital as well as the system of
production could be planned in advance, but it was not until 1936 and
1937 that Mussolini emphasised the economic significance of increasing
state intervention in industry; and as late as 1938 there was little co-
ordination of the national economy through the action of the corpora-
tions. In France economic policy relied on quantitative import restric-
tions, as it did in a smaller country like Rumania, where the number of
quotas rose from 120 in November 1932 to 500 in July 1933 (50 per cent of
Rumania’s imports). In both Italy and France (as in the United States)
industrial production in 1937 remained less than it had been in 1929 when
the Great Depression began.
Only in Sweden, where Ernst Wigforss was an outstanding finance
minister and where economists were brought directly into the service of
government, was there a sophisticated official approach to the dangers of
deflation, yet even there external forces influenced the pattern of recovery,
and deficit budgeting, thought of as contra-cyclical, did not wipe out un-
employment. Paradoxically Wigforss had drawn many of his ideas from
liberals and socialists in the United Kingdom, 4 where an unmistakable
economic ‘recovery’ between 1933 and 1937 owed little or nothing to the
strength of these ideas in official quarters, and depended rather on an
‘ untheoretical ’ combination of devaluation (embarked upon with such a
display of reluctance in 1931), ‘rationalisation’, protection and cheap
money. In a sense, the British recovery was a compensation for the stagna-
tion of the 1920s: belated new investment, particularly in building,
remedied serious under-investment during the 1920s. There was a kind of
‘muddling through’ to recovery which had little to do with ‘planning’. In
1 H. Macmillan, The Middle Way (London, 1938), pp. 7-8.
* Cmd. 4066, 4181 (1932); G. C. Allen, British Industries and their Organisation (3rd ed.
London, 1951), pp. 109-12.
3 For a more positive evaluation of ‘the reassertion of state power’ by the National
government in England, particularly in the ‘critical period’ from 1931 to 1935, see S. H.
Beer, Modern British Politics (London, 1964), ch. x.
* K.-G, Landgren, Den ‘nya ekonomien' i Sverige : J. M. Keynes , E. Wigforss, B. Ohiin
och utvecklinger, 1929-3$ (Stockholm, i960).
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the United States, Roosevelt was a pragmatist, not a doctrinaire, although
his advisers included doctrinaires of different pedigrees with different
programmes to advocate. At the international policy-making level, only
the reports of the International Labour Organisation provided any kind of
consistent if limited theoretical support for ‘expansionism’, through, for
example, concerted international public works policies.
At the beginning of the Depression, as in the years of recovery during
the late 1930s, the one comprehensive planning scheme in operation was
that of the Soviet Union, where output rose rapidly during the 1930s. Yet
as a result of the revolution of 1917 and the foundation of new economic
policies in the 1920s, the Soviet Union had virtually disappeared from
the international economic stage, and during the Depression remained
insulated from the world economy. There was far less knowledge of its
planning procedures than of the slogans used by its leaders, not least
because the planning procedures were never very clearly elucidated even
in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet planning system set out in a phrase of Trotsky’s to bring aim
and plan into the very basis of society, although at the beginning of the
revolution the mechanisms of planning were still to be thought out as well
as worked out (see ch. xv). ‘There was nothing written about such matters
in the Bolshevik textbooks, or even in those of the Mensheviks’, wrote
Lenin six months after the October Revolution. The machinery of planning
in the Soviet Union, as in the case of war-time economic organisation, was
the product of national emergency. It was at first tentative and hesitant,
but it improved as a result of actual experience of economic administra-
tion, first in emergency conditions and then in the period of economic
transformation under the First and Second Five-Year Plans. There was
continual adaption and reorganisation within the Supreme Council of
National Economy (VSNKh or Vesenkha ), a body which came into
existence as early as December 1917 and lasted until January 1932. Such
fundamental problems as that of relating central ‘ steering’ of the economy
to local managerial effort in the ‘trusts’, the main units of nationalised
production, were tackled by trial and error. There was no pre-existing
conception of design. ‘Socialist construction cannot proceed otherwise
than gropingly’, an official report put it in 1929, ‘and, whenever practice is
in advance of theory, faultless creativeness is impossible.’ 1
In the long run, the most important agency for drafting and co-
ordinating Soviet plans was Gosplan, first set up in February 1921 as an
advisory body attached to the Council of Labour and Defence. Yet
Gosplan ' s earliest tasks were ‘perspective’ plans of a somewhat abstract
character, involving such general objectives as the extensive electrification
of industry or the nationalisation of the corn trade. ‘There is too much
1 Control Figures of the National Economy (Moscow, 1928-9), p. 2.
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talk of electrification, and too little about current economic plans’, Lenin
wrote to its chairman in 192 1 } It was not until 1925 that Gosplan began to
issue economic ‘control figures’ for the whole of the Soviet economy, and
not until 1931, after bitter controversies, that the series of figures taken from
separate industries became a system of figures related to an overall plan
for the ensuing year. The creation of a Central Department of Economic
Accounting (TSUNKhU) in the same year facilitated the necessary calcula-
tion of the ‘material needs’ (including the volume of investment) de-
manded by government policy. After the elimination of VSNKh in 1932,
Gosplan 1 s co-ordinating powers greatly increased, and reforms of 1935
and 1938 emphasised its ‘leadership ’ role. Although economic administra-
tion was left to other agencies — People’s Commissariats or ministries,
which increased in number from three in 1932 (heavy industry, light
industry, and timber) to twenty in 1939 — Gosplan established its position
as the central headquarters of Soviet planning.
The basic problem of the Soviet economy throughout the 1920s and
1930s was that of transforming a relatively backward country into an
extensively industrialised modem state without having to depend on
private capitalists at home or on foreign investors overseas. The history
of the transformation may be divided into three main phases — first, a
period of war communism from the revolution of 1917 to March 1921,
during which the state set out to capture the commanding heights of the
existing economic system; secondly, a period of recovery and restoration
accomplished within the framework of the so-called New Economic
Policy (1922-7), which aimed at increasing the flow of goods to the
markets, if need be by encouraging a strictly limited amount of individual
enterprise; and thirdly, after strategic and controversial decisions, a period
of intensive industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation, beginning
with the announcement of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928.
The First Five-Year Plan began as a ‘perspective plan’, but it was
discussed and reshaped frequently before efforts were made to implement
it. Its keynote was a high rate of investment, particularly in heavy industry
and in agriculture. During the first two years of the plan the objectives
were secured without great difficulty, but in 1929 and 1930 many problems
arose as a result both of inflationary pressure and the deliberate attempt
by the government to force the pace of socialisation. In the case of agricul-
ture, enforced collectivisation was pushed by vigorous coercion. In 1927,
all the various forms of state and co-operative farming covered a mere
2 per cent of the peasants : by the beginning of March 1930 the figure had
risen to 55 per cent and by 1936 to 90 per cent. 2 Coercion seemed the only
means of solving the government’s serious agricultural problems, which
had proved intractable in the 1920s, and of making labour move from
1 Lenin, Collected Works, vol. xxvi, p, 296.
8 See N. Jasny, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford, 1949).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
villages to towns; it was only at the cost, therefore, of great immediate
hardship to large numbers of individuals and to the peasant class as a
whole that agriculture was integrated (and even then imperfectly) into the
general planning system.
The years 1929-31 marked the final capture by the state of the whole of
the economic system, and the agricultural changes were paralleled by
trade-union reforms, the dismissal of old leaders, a tightening up of
factory discipline and the conversion of the unions into quasi-govemmental
agencies for raising productivity in the interests of the plan. There were
also important fiscal and credit reforms, including the introduction of
turnover tax in 1931, the creation of specialised investment banks in 1932,
and the conferring on Gosbank of monopoly powers to grant short-term
credits. These too had the same objective: to make the plan work. ‘There
is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot take’ was one of the key slogans of this
drive.
The First Five-Year Plan, carried out in ‘the hard years’, set the model,
but its successor, the Second Five-Year Plan, extending from 1933 to
1937, stressed practical advance and consolidation rather than gigantic
leaps forward (see below, ch. xv). The economic atmosphere in which it
was carried through seemed favourable. By 1935 it was considered safe to
abandon rationing. In that year too a Collective Farm Statute, in force
with little change until 1957, brought to an end the period of rural turmoil
associated with ‘ revolution from above ’ . Subsequent increase in agricultural
output was accompanied by rising industrial productivity, facilitated by
the relative abundance of labour. New factories were well established, and
began to add substantially to national output. In 1937 four-fifths of
industrial output came from plants that were newly built or that had been
reconstructed since 1928, while two metallurgical plants alone, Magnito-
gorsk and Stalinsk, had a productive capacity equal to that of the entire
pre-1914 iron and steel industry.
The size of the Soviet economic system enabled it to pay smaller atten-
tion to foreign trade than would have been possible for a country more
dependent on supplies of imports. On the basis of a great diversity of
agricultural and non-agricultural materials, the Soviet Union was able to
set up and operate plants which turned out most of the manufacturing
products necessary for the development of the economy. From 1918 on-
wards international trade was monopolised by the State Commissariat for
Foreign Trade. This monopoly enabled the government to maintain the
rouble at an artificial value in terms of foreign currencies and to insist on
an extremely tight import programme. In the critical years from 1929 to
1932 almost 90 per cent of imports consisted of goods for use in industry.
Trade corporations specialising in the import or export of particular
commodities worked closely within the framework of the plans, with
Gosplan making known to them figures of essential import requirements
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and exportable surpluses. The Second Five-Year Plan explicitly limited
exports to ‘surplus products of the national economy’ and imports to
what could be paid for from such surpluses. In 1938, indeed, the total
value of foreign trade amounted to only 24 per cent of the 1913 level
(although it had been as high as 73 per cent in 1930, the peak year).
Soviet planning was thus as independent as possible of world economic
movements. It could even run directly counter to such movements, as it
did in the Depression years when it dumped exports abroad at prices well
below costs. It could also use trade as a political instrument, with long-
term foreign contracts and agreements acting as useful political counters.
While during the late 1930s preparations for war distorted or even
disrupted general economic advance in the Soviet Union, there was a
sense in which, even apart from development within the war sector, the
entire planned economy of the Soviet Union was throughout the whole of
the inter-war years ‘a sui generis war economy’. 1 All-out concentration of
effort on major objectives determined by political authority — ‘campaign
planning’ — was associated with appeals to the patriotism and socialist
consciousness of managers and workers alike. It was not merely foreign
trade which ‘politicised’ markets and defied price-cost criteria. ‘The price
mechanism was hardly used for resource allocation at all, except to
distribute to the citizens in an orderly way whatever happened to be
available for them.’ 2 In general, rational economic calculation was
relegated to a minor place in ‘the thought processes of the leadership’,
emphasis being placed throughout on plan as basic ‘law’, the will of the
lawgiver, the conscious direction of the economy. ‘Planning is no mere
piling up of tables and figures unrelated to the course of fulfilment of the
plan’, Molotov proclaimed in 1939. 3 Fulfilment was a practical task,
political and administrative, and it is significant that no general textbook
of economics appeared in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1954. 4
Whatever the disadvantages of such a situation — disadvantages which
have been widely commented upon by Soviet economists in the late 1950s
and 1960s — Soviet planning, with all its miscalculations, its wastes and
its coercion, undoubtedly appealed at the time and since both to groups in
‘advanced countries’ suffering from chronic unemployment and to ‘back-
ward countries’ anxious for economic growth. The ‘war’ nature of the
economy and the sense of ‘strategy’ which underlay Soviet development
had a positive appeal in themselves. So too did the boldness of the vision.
Before 1939 the Turkish Five-Year Plan and the Mexican Six-Year Plan
1 O. Lange, The Political Economy of Socialism (Warsaw, 1957), p. 16.
s A. Nove, The Soviet Economy (London, 1961), p 147.
* The Third Five-Year Plan of the National Economy of the USSR (Moscow, 1939),
pp. 20-1.
4 Nove, op. cit. p. 267. A textbook was being planned in 1941, when there were signs that
the need for a ‘new socialist economy’ was felt by the authority. Even the word ‘Statistics’
dropped out of the title of the central accounting agency between 1931 and 1941.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
were influenced by Soviet models: so, too, were some of the economic
policies of the Soviet Union’s non-Communist neighbour, Poland. It is
since 1945, however, that the influence has become obvious and direct in
Communist countries (all of them, except China, smaller and less favoured
by nature than the Soviet Union) and that some at least among the many
non-communist writers on ‘development’ have acknowledged that the
Soviet ‘path’ to economic development has general relevance. As in war,
‘ the process (of growth) required the breaking of a succession of critical
bottlenecks’. Marginal calculus was less important than sector planning,
and people or groups standing in the way of sector planning had to have
their power to curb or to resist destroyed. ‘Total war, like planning
development of poor and stagnant economies, involves marked and
discontinuous structural changes, and resource allocation without refer-
ence to the market.’ 1 Yet this is only one part of an analysis. The argu-
ment about Soviet planning continues, with the experience of other post-
1945 plans — notably those of Communist Poland and Yugoslavia —
influencing the debate in the Soviet Union itself.
German planning under National Socialism, unlike Soviet planning,
accepted private enterprise and the economic institutions of capitalism.
Within this framework the government assumed a firm control over man-
power and production, distribution and banking, consumption and invest-
ment, and foreign exchange and trade. The aim of the government through
what was called Wirtschaftslenkung, guided private enterprise, was to
direct the economic machine for political purposes, ultimately, if occasion
demanded, for the needs of war. Yet there was no full ‘war economy’ in
Germany until after 1942. Armament expenditures, which rose regularly
as a proportion of national expenditure from 1935 onwards, fitted Ger-
many to embark upon Blitzkrieg but not to sustain prolonged war against
powers like the United States, which had developed war production much
more comprehensively. It has been estimated that half total investment
between 1933 and 1938 was outside military facilities or basic industries. 2
There was, indeed, a certain vagueness about the criteria of German
economic policy, as there was about the theories on which it should be
based. ‘Economic policy in the national socialist state’, wrote one com-
mentator, ‘ is determined by considerations of expediency, and, without
prejudice, applies such means as are necessary in every given case for the
welfare of the people.’ 8 The term ‘ welfare ’ was elastic, including guns and
butter, 4 even if the effect of government policy was to control inflation by
limiting the freedom both of the wage-earner and of the entrepreneur. A
1 B. Higgins, Economic Development (New York, 1959).
2 B, H. Klein, Germany's Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge, Mass., 1959),
pp. 14-15.
3 L. Barth, Wesen und Aufgaben (Berlin, 1936), p. 26.
4 A. S. Milward, The German Economy at War (London, 1965), p. 6.
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wage-stop was coupled with strict limitations on the distributed dividends
received by shareholders — a national incomes policy; exchange control
and import restrictions regulated the balance of payments; and it was
emphasised through every form of organisation and propaganda that
there was a public or national dimension to all economic organisation.
‘Private enterprises have become public trusts’, wrote the Deutsche
Volkswirt in 1937, ‘ the State is for all practical purposes a partner in every
German enterprise. ’
When the National Socialists took over in 1933 they found already in
existence the two necessary components of their later policy — first, a
highly organised industrial structure which had already been affected by
the propaganda of ‘rationalisation’ in the 1920s, and, secondly, exchange
control, first introduced in July 1931 to stop the flight of capital and which
had become a point of departure for more extensive economic regulation.
They made few economic innovations and had no agreed economic
theory to support them — one section of the party, indeed, opposed all
economic calculation as a form of excuse for a failure of will — but they
were determined to make the economic system fit their aims. The existence
of large-scale unemployment gave them an immediate objective in the
shape of the promise of work for all : the dream of national self-sufficiency
or at least of a sharp reduction in Germany’s heavy dependence on overseas
countries for raw materials, like iron, oil and rubber (only coal was in ade-
quate supply from within) linked possible technological policy with trade.
Without the existing highly developed co-ordination of German
business they could scarcely have evolved their own institutional structure.
The Central Committee of Entrepreneurial Associations had been set up
in 1920. The National Union of German Industry ( Reichsverband der
Deutschen Industrie), its most important member, had been formed in
1919 from a union of two older organisations, one going back to 1876 and
the other to 1895. The influence and scope of the Reichsverband was wide-
ranging, and its organisation, under the leadership of the most powerful
industrialists in Germany, was complex, based on dual units, regional
and functional. In 1932 the 29 industrial and 50 territorial organisations
which belonged corporatively to it accounted for about 80 per cent of
German industrial enterprise. 1 It was able to exercise considerable
influence on the making of national policy. The National Socialist
government, in establishing the National Economic Chamber ( Reichs -
wirtschaftskammer) and the Co-operative Council of Chambers of Industry
and Commerce, at first conceived its task merely as the limited one of ‘co-
ordinating with the present national government the existing organisation
of the vast field of German business administration ’. 2 National Socialist
1 K. Guth, Die Reichsgruppe Industrie (Berlin, 1941), p. 19.
* Dr Kurt Schmitt in 1934. See R. A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism
(London, 1937), p. 266.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
legislation, especially the ‘Law on the Organic Structure of German
Industry’ of February 1934, made membership of the Chamber and of
subordinate groups compulsory on all entrepreneurs, established the
‘leadership principle’, and laid down that the guiding rule of the system
was ‘never to act against the wishes of the government of the Reich’. 1
From 1934 onwards big business was clearly far more powerful than small
business, and strengthening cartellisation and making it more comprehen-
sive facilitated further concentration and control.
The government itself had a number of agencies at its own disposal.
The Ministry of Economics, inaugurated in 1919, was a survival from the
Weimar Republic, and Kurt Schmitt, minister in July 1933, made every
effort to reconcile business to the new order. 2 So long as Hjalmar Schacht
acted as minister — from August 1934 until November 1937 — the ministry
extended control over German banking and trade, and was drawn into
difficult debates about the financing of rearmament. Schacht himself
experimented freely with bilateral trade policies and sought to increase
business opportunities and profits, but feared inflation and was an ultra-
conservative opponent of deficit financing. After 1938, however, the
Ministry of Economics, under Walter Funk, lost most of its influence. In
the meantime, as emphasis passed from recovery to rearmament, the
office of the Four-Year Plan had been set up in 1936 under the personal
control of General Goering with immense powers on paper — above all,
to increase the flow of synthetic materials (capacity for synthetic oil
production was increased more than twofold between 1936 and 1939,
while still remaining 45 per cent below the target figure) and to strengthen
the hold of the National Socialist party over the economy. The first
objective was clearly expressed by Hitler in an anti-Schachtian directive to
Goering in 1936: ‘the question of costs of raw materials is absolutely
irrelevant, for it is preferable for us to produce more expensive tyres
which are then available, than to buy theoretically cheap tyres for
which the Ministry of Economics cannot allot the foreign exchange’.
Hitler associated this statement with an attack on the ‘capital system’,
linking Goering’s duties with the second objective in the remark that if
the industrialists refused to co-operate, ‘ the National Socialist State itself
will know how to perform this task’. 3 The symbol of the second objective
was the Hermann Goering steelworks on the Brunswick plain, the visible
memorial of the National Socialist system, yet despite the existence of this
and other ventures German steel production in 1939 exceeded that of 1929
only because of the acquisition of plant in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The last of the government agencies, the army itself, had also built up
1 Barth, Wesen und Aufgaben, p. 13.
2 See A. Schweitzer, Big Business in the Third Reich (London. 1964), pp. 124 ff., 249 ff.
Schweitzer brings out the conflicts between ‘small’ and ‘big’ business, pp. 524 ff.
3 Quoted in Klein, Germany's Economic Preparations for War, p. 36.
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THE WORLD ECONOMY
its own economic departments from the top level downwards: General
Georg Thomas, the officer concerned with this apparatus, was deeply
concerned about the failure to co-ordinate and to extend national economic
planning before 1939, while lacking the statistical or theoretical knowledge
fully to support his case that Hitler would be taking an unjustifiable risk if
he were to plan a war before the economy was ready. 1 Thomas’s complaint
that he was informed neither of total material requirements nor of strategic
plans has been used by recent historians to prove the case that until 1942
Germany’s economy in military terms was prepared only for small-scale
quick wars which would not unduly disturb civilian standards or ways of
life. It was, indeed, ‘a cardinal policy of Hitler that war strategy was not a
concern of economic planners ’, and since they were given only the inflated
demands for men and materials of the various claimants ‘it was impossible
to put together a very intelligent picture of requirements’. 2 At the same
time, the German armament firms were elevated to the position of
Wehrwirtschaftsfiihrer in 1935 and 1936, and their managers could act in a
semi-military capacity. 3
More important in retrospect than the elaborate structure of planning,
which was far from producing an efficient, well-organised, industrial effort,
was the experiment in reducing unemployment. Between 1933 and 1939
the Germans achieved what most of the private enterprise economies
were eventually to proclaim during the second world war as the main goal
of economic planning — full employment. Here again they inherited the
strategy. In December 1932 a Commissioner for the Creation of Employ-
ment had been appointed, and two days before the beginning of the
National Socialist regime an ‘urgency programme’ had been put into
operation involving heavy public expenditure on roads, houses, public
utilities and inland water transport. In May 1933 Hitler announced a plan
for the abolition of unemployment. Sizeable public expenditures — -not in-
volving, as in the United States ‘New Deal’, any serious reliance on
deficit budgeting or for that matter on new forms of taxation — associated
with a revival of private investment led to substantial gains in total output
and employment between 1933 and 1936. Unemployment fell to i-6
million in 1936, approximately the pre-depression figure, and to less than
0-5 million two years later. 4
The pursuit of full employment was coupled with extensive measures of
labour and price control. Labour control, which began with the destruction
of free trade unions, prevented wage-earners from pressing for wage
increases in a sellers’ market ; price control was considered necessary not
so much to ‘regulate’ the economy as to safeguard workers’ loyalty
and morale. The law concerning the Regulation of National Labour,
1 Milward, The German Economy at War, pp. 24-5. 8 Klein, op. cit. p. 38.
’ Schweitzer, op. cit. p. 533.
4 See C. W. Guillebaud, The Economic Recovery of Germany, 1933-8 (Cambridge, 1939).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
promulgated in January 1934, and the order of October 1934 substituted
for the existing trade-union organisation a Labour Front and for collective
bargaining and the right to strike ‘enterprise communities’ ( Betriebs -
gemeinschaften ) and ‘enterprise rules’. Trustees of Labour {Treuhander der
Arbeit ) were given wide powers to regulate the labour market as a whole.
Only because of the existence of controls of this kind was the government’s
wage-stop effective: they were retained after recovery had been achieved,
and they were associated also with moves toward a longer working day
and towards labour direction. As far as prices were concerned, a Reich
Commissioner for the Supervision of Prices had been appointed as early
as December 1931, but in 1936 a new office, that of Reich Commissioner
of Price Formation, was set up. 1 A Price-Stop Decree of November 1936
pegged prices to those of an arbitrarily chosen date, 17 October 1936, and
prohibited all further increases in response to rising demand. There was
talk in some circles, indeed, of the laws of supply and demand having been
superseded. In fact, the Commissioner had wide powers to raise prices, and
could claim that when he did so the higher production costs which were
responsible for the rise derived from higher import costs or from the high
costs of substitute materials.
All German internal policy depended, in fact, on vigorous control of
foreign trade. Exchange control and refusal to devalue the mark had been
pre-1933 policies, and Schacht’s ‘New Plan’ of September 1934 followed
naturally, albeit with greater energy and resourcefulness, from the work of
his predecessors. Licences had to be obtained for any transactions in-
volving an outflow of foreign exchange. All incoming payments from
abroad had to be handed over to the Reichsbank, and as a check exporters
were compelled to declare to the authorities the nature and value of the
goods transferred out of the country. Imports were kept to a minimum,
and interest and dividend payments to foreigners were first reduced and
then restricted to payments out of export surpluses. Within the framework
of regulation, trade discrimination, with varying rates of exchange for
different types of transaction, was developed to its extreme practical
limits. Wherever possible, imports were only drawn from countries
willing to hold balances in marks and not in fully convertable currency.
Special mark rates were adjusted in terms of the structure of each separate
market. A regional bloc, mainly in southern and eastern Europe, was
built up on the basis of bilateral agreements providing bulk turnover and
long-term contracts.
There was no spectacular recovery of German exports as a result of
these intricate measures : indeed, in relation to total industrial production
exports declined from 225 percentin 1933 to 13-1 per cent in 1938. By that
1 Price controls had been ineffective between 1933 and 1936. The official cost-of-living
index rose 7 per cent between 1933 and 1936 and wholesale prices by about 13-7 per cent
(Schweitzer, op. cit pp. 324-5).
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THE WORLD ECONOMY
year, however, only about one-fifth of Germany’s foreign trade required
and produced foreign exchange. The lines of trade were regulated in the
interests of state policy, and in the business recession of 1938 it was not
only the Communist Soviet Union but capitalist and National Socialist
Germany which was insulated from the rest of the world.
Germany spent more on rearmament as a proportion of gross national
product than any other of the other European powers between 1936 and
1939 — the proportion rising from 3-2 per cent in 1933 to 5-5 per cent in
1935 and 1 8- 1 per cent in 1938 — yet in most other European countries,
including the United Kingdom, increased rearmament expenditure — in
the United Kingdom it followed the building ‘ boom ’ — was an important
factor in the economic recovery of the late 1930s. 1 While such expenditure
contributed to the demand for industrial raw materials and to the develop-
ment of new forms of technology, it did little to mobilise to the full either
national or international economic resources, including manpower. As
industrial output increased, unemployment remained high, and there was
talk in some circles of inevitable tailing off of growth or ‘satiation’, as
Keynes called it, in ‘mature’ economies. Moreover, while after a long
interval there was some improvement in Europe’s relative position in
world markets vis-a-vis that of the United States, a reversal of the trend of
the 1 920s, there was only a very limited revival of world trade. 2 Even as
late as 1937 the volume of world trade was barely equal to that of 1929,
and all official attempts to reduce tariffs and quotas and to stimulate
greater freedom of trade, like those of Cordell Hull from 1934 s and of
Van Zeeland in 1938, 4 met with little response. The contrast between
advancing industrial output and stagnating commerce remained striking.
In the United Kingdom, for instance, the increase of 24 per cent in the
volume of industrial production between 1929 and 1937 was accompanied
by a fall in the volume of exports of no less than 16 per cent.
Both the constituents of world trade and the pattern of international
payments altered during the 1930s. In 1937 the quantum of trade in
foodstuffs was about 7 per cent below the 1929 level and in manufactured
goods 14 per cent below, while in raw materials it was 12 per cent above.
Such divergent movements were associated with inverse movements in
relative prices. Industrial countries continued to enjoy extremely favour-
1 See M. M. Postan, British War Production (London, 1952), ch. 2.
2 Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy, ch. ix.
* Between 1934 and 1939 the United States concluded trade agreements with twenty
countries, half of them in Latin America. In 1938, after protracted discussions, an agreement
was reached with the United Kingdom.
4 In April 1937 the British and French governments requested Van Zeeland, then Prime
Minister of Belgium, to enquire into ‘the possibilities of obtaining a general reduction
of quotas and other obstacles to international trade’: his report was published in January
1938.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
able terms of trade as against the suppliers of primary products, thereby
continuing to gain from the inability of ‘underdeveloped’ countries to
raise their incomes or to diversify their economies. There were immense
disparities in the national incomes per head of different countries and in
their standards of living and their ability to use manufactured products. 1
Although there were still very few signs that such a situation provoked
articulate and effective response, it was beginning to be realised that, if
the demand for ‘planning’ arose in the poorer societies, it would probably
take the form of ‘a rational inference from an urge for development’ and
from ‘ the knowledge of the adverse circumstances ’ in which they found
themselves. 2 Some of the reports both of the International Labour Organi-
sation and of the League of Nations in the late 1930s directed attention to
the links between economic and social policy. On the initiative of Australia,
for example, the League in 1935 initiated an enquiry into ‘nutrition in
relation to health, agriculture, and economic policy’; and two years later
a further enquiry into the broader problems of raising general standards
of living was undertaken jointly by the League’s Economic Committee
and the International Labour Organisation. In 1938 the League appointed
a committee to examine ‘practical measures for preventing or mitigating
trade depressions ’.
There was an element of irony in this concern for welfare just at the time
when warfare was preoccupying the minds of Europe’s politicians. The
international economic context in which the enquiries were launched was
in some ways equally unpropitious. The market continued to set the
terms of most international economic relationships— the price of cocoa,
for example, fell calamitously by 40 per cent in the recession years 1937-8
— yet it was an imperfect market, tampered with by governments but not
controlled.
State intervention was being gradually extended into the field of price formation
and income distribution. As a result, some of the market incentives to transforma-
tion were weakened: the idea of national planning was, on the other hand, not so
far advanced that governments were prepared to steer the development of the
economy in a particular direction; or that state directives took over the functions
earlier exercised by private initiative. Imperfections of the old liberal market
economy were partly replaced by imperfections in state intervention . 3
Bearing in mind both the precariousness as vantage-points of the years
1937 and 1938, and the dangers of relying too heavily on a comparison of
index numbers over long periods of time, the pattern of industry and trade
as it appeared on the eve of the second world war can be pieced together
1 C. Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (London, 1940), ch. 2; A. Patel, ‘The
Economic Distance between Nations: Its Origin, Measurement and Outlook’ (Economic
Journal, vol. lxxtv, 1964).
2 Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State, p. 89.
3 Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy, p. 36.
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THE WORLD ECONOMY
to illustrate which historical relationships within the international
economy had changed and which had remained more or less the same
since the beginning of the century :
World trends in population , production and trade, 1896-1938 1
1913 = 100
Production Trade volume Trade unit values
t \ ( \ i \
Popu-
Manu-
Primary
Manu-
Primary
Manu-
Primary
lation
factures
Produce
factures
Produce
factures
Produce
1896-1900
90
54
76 (1900)
54
62
82
77
1911-13
99
95
93
94
97
98
98
1926-30
111
141
123
M 3
123
145
128
1931-3
117
no
120
81
1 1 6
100
68
1934-5
120
133
125
84
1 14
117
85
1936-8
124
158
135
100
125
120
93
From a more recent vantage-point, with the benefit of hindsight acquired
since 1945, we can recognise not only that the late 1930s were ‘transi-
tional’ years in relation to national and international economic policies,
but that the break during this period in the historical relationship between
indices of world manufacturing output and world trade in manufactures
was ‘a discontinuity due to special factors (trade and currency restrictions)
operating to depress the level of trade’. 2 We can similarly recognise
that some of the trade and currency restrictions, like the restrictions on
output, were in themselves transitional examples of ‘interventionism’.
In this transitional period, there was no world-wide monetary standard,
and the attempt on the part of a few countries to cling to the gold standard
proved as transient as had been the attempt on the part of the United
Kingdom to ‘restore’ the international gold standard system in the 1920s.
The prolonged effort by France to maintain the standard — and there were
sufficiently strong French gold reserves to make this possible — entailed
rigorous deflation and placed French business men in an unfavourable
position vis-a-vis their foreign competitors. Moreover, there was in-
evitable pressure on wages to keep prices down, along with large-scale
repatriation of foreign workers and a return of many French workers to
the land, where they contributed to concealed unemployment. In 1936 a
new Popular Front government in France decided that it was impossible
to increase economic activity, at a low ebb in France, without devaluing
the franc and maintaining parity through an exchange equalisation fund.
Leon Blum’s abandonment of the gold standard in September 1936 was a
landmark in French economic policy, associated as it was with an attempt
1 This table is based on Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade, p. 80.
2 For a detailed analysis of the trends set out in the table see ibid. ch. 4. See also F. Hil-
gerdt. The Network of World Trade (Geneva, 1 942), andR. de Oliveira Campos, G. Haberler,
J. Meade and J. Tinbergen, Trends in International Trade (Geneva, 1958).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
at a kind of French ‘new deal’ in social affairs. 1 In fact, there was no
permanent improvement in France’s position. Despite an immediate up-
surge in economic activity, economic policies (no more strongly grounded
in theory than those of Roosevelt or of the United Kingdom) clashed
with social policies, and, after an alarming ‘ flight of capital ’ and months of
further currency depreciation, France alone of the advanced industrial
countries did not succeed in regaining its 1919 peak level of industrial
production until after the second world war.
The other European countries which had stuck to the gold standard
after 1932 — including Italy and the Netherlands — put restrictions on the
use of gold after 1936, and thereafter gold movements played little part in
the maintenance of international exchange rates. The gold standard system
had finally collapsed without any other ‘ system ’ taking its place, although
after the French devaluation the United States, the United Kingdom and
France pledged themselves in a Tripartite Monetary Agreement of
September 1936 to take practical steps to ensure exchange stability, to
seek ‘ the restoration of order in international economic relations ’, and ‘ to
pursue a policy which will tend to promote prosperity in the world and to
improve the standard of living’.
If the practical steps taken to maintain exchange stability were in part
successful between 1936 and 1939, there were continued difficulties in
relation to international payments and, because of the drying up of inter-
national investment, a failure adequately to achieve the most general of
the objectives. The pattern of international payments in the late 1930s, like
the pattern of international trade, bore many of the marks of the past, while
showing some significant signs of change. Europe’s trade continued to be
characterised by a large import surplus into the United Kingdom and an
export surplus from Germany, while world trade continued to depend on a
European import surplus from the United States and a United States
import surplus from the rest of the world. Yet the United States main-
tained a large annual export surplus throughout the 1930s (except in
1936), continued to drain gold from the rest of the world, and, despite
Cordell Hull’s plans for freer trade, contributed to the trend towards
bilateralism which had been made a deliberate goal of German policy. At
the same time, it had lost so heavily on its earlier capital investments over-
seas that it ceased to act as an international lender. In these circumstances,
the United Kingdom no longer played its traditional role. Empire countries
were no longer able to earn as much as they had done in the 1920s by
selling their materials in Europe and the United States, while many
manufactured goods were shut out by protection from the British market.
The result was that bilateral exchanges between the Empire and the
United Kingdom gained in importance. Never able to achieve an ap-
preciable surplus on its current international transactions, the United
1 R. Marjolin, 'Reflections on the Blum Experiment’ ( Economica , vol. v, May 1938).
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THE WORLD ECONOMY
Kingdom also ceased to invest overseas. On balance between 1930 and
1939 it actually imported capital.
There was clearly no place in the autarkical world of the 1930s for
foreign lending of the old type, organised largely by private business on
the basis of market incentives, yet foreign capital in the form of old-style
lending or of new types of assistance was necessary if the ‘ underdeveloped
countries’ were to benefit from technical progress (a fact of life in the
‘advanced’ countries) and to achieve even limited economic and social
advance. Relatively few long-term or short-term funds moved from
industrial to non-industrial countries in the years immediately preceding
the second world war. On the one hand, the risks of private foreign invest-
ment were considered too great and the instability of exchange rates
created unfavourable conditions for expansion; on the other hand, there
were no experiments in ‘aid’ or in ‘redistribution’. At its best, the inter-
national economic specialisation of the late nineteenth century had
served as something more than a device for using to the greatest effect the
labour of a given number of human beings or the resources of a given
group of countries: it had served as an engine of growth. 1 When it
ceased to serve this purpose, the demand for something different to take
its place was bound to grow. Those of the world’s inhabitants who made
up Western society were certainly better off on the eve of the second world
war than they had been in the first decade of the century : economic in-
stability had not meant economic or social stagnation. Yet for millions of
people outside Europe difficulties and adversities were not confined to
periods of depression: poverty was endemic, and social aspirations were
severely limited.
The place of Europe within the international economic system on the
eve of a war which was radically to transform both its economics and its
politics can be set out in statistical terms. It had gained slightly over the
United States as its newest industries — like automobiles and electricity —
made up lost ground and also because discrimination against United States
goods had been introduced as a deliberate element in certain national
policies. Yet in other industries, notably textiles, Japanese competition had
proved increasingly powerful during the 1930s, 2 and alongside all the new
areas of European industrial development (many of them based on ‘light
industry’ or the service industries and located near the large metropolitan
conglomerations), there were ‘depressed’ areas, like South Wales, the
north-east of England, the industrial zone around Lyons and parts of the
Ruhr. Alongside new industries, like cement or rayon, there were old
problem industries, like coal or cotton. There had been a move throughout
the 1930s and throughout many parts of Europe towards larger economic
1 D. H. Robertson, ‘The Future of International Trade’ ( Economic Journal, vol. XLvm,
1938 ).
2 G. E. Hubbard, Eastern Industrialisation and its Effect on the West (2nd ed. London,
1938).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
units in both old and new industries — evidence of further economic
concentration — but size was no necessary guarantee of efficiency or of
concern for what has subsequently been called ‘ research and development ’ ;
and in some countries, notably France among the most important, small
units continued to predominate. The three most important economies of
the years before 1913 accounted for less in Europe’s trade in 1938 than
they had done in 1913, yet, in spite of all the other changes, there had been
little change in the proportion — 40 per cent — of Europe’s total exports
being despatched outside Europe. The other 60 per cent had gone to
other countries in Europe, constituting about half of Europe’s total
imports, the other half being imports from overseas:
Europe's exports and imports 1
1913 1928 1938
t
1
t *
3
t
\
Percentage
Percentage
Percentage
of each
of each
of each
national
national
national
total
total
total
Percentage
going
Percentage going
Percentage
going
of
to
of
to
of
to
total
Europe
total
Europe
total
Europe
Exports
United Kingdom 26-1
30-1
23-6
316
22-2
32*1
Germany
247
663
193
699
21*1
65* 1
France
‘Big Three’
136
66-6
137
625
8*6
542
totals
644
517
566
5 2-2
519
492
Italy \
Belgium
Luxembourg '
Netherlands
► 21*9
706
21-8
68-6
25*5
663
Switzerland
Sweden t
The rest
13*7
79'5
21-6
85-6
22*6
837
Imports
United Kingdom 26 9
375
27-6
389
310
31*0
Germany
21-2
407
17-8
47-1
50*3
50*3
France
‘Big Three’
I 3'3
465
1 1*2
427
99
337
totals
61 4
40- 6
566
42-2
57-5
37-0
Italy
Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands
' 247
59'3
21*7
6i*o
22*5
62*6
Switzerland
Sweden ,
The rest
13*9
70-3
21-7
75-9
20*0
75-3
1 Table derived from Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy,
pp. 173, 175 -
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THE WORLD ECONOMY
If the precarious vantage-points of 1937 and 1938 are abandoned,
problems of planning and interdependence on the eve of the world’s
greatest and most comprehensive war look different according to the
choice of alternative later vantage-points. During the war years themselves
and in the immediate aftermath of war, two incompatible conclusions were
drawn by different writers and politicians from the ‘failure’ of the
system before 1939 — the first that restoration of unimpeded market forces
was urgently necessary, the second that, ‘ in such conditions of disequili-
brium as we shall have to expect at the end of this war, it will be im-
possible to rely on market forces to restore equilibrium’. 1 The first view
was common in Europe and the United States, 2 the second predominant
in the United Kingdom and in many countries outside Europe.
In theUnited Kingdom, in particular, special emphasis was placed on the
need both to maintain full employment through Keynesian techniques
of controlling the level of aggregate demand and to advance the complex of
comprehensive or more comprehensive social policies to which the label
‘welfare state’ was soon attached. The name of William Beveridge was
linked with both policies, since, in addition to popularising some of
Keynes’s ideas in his Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), he was the
architect of ‘ Beveridgism ’, a far-reaching war-time plan for extended social
security. In post- 1945 Germany, by contrast, there was a reaction against
‘the extremes of nationalism, autarky and government control’ 3 and
little interest in the economics of full employment. In the former German-
occupied territories of Europe, the most difficult immediate task was that
of identifying and relating on one side the practical short-term problems
of reconstruction and on the other the long-term problems of develop-
ment and growth. Yet once this task had been accomplished, there were
differences of opinion about the range and scope of economic policy.
While it was recognised that popular aspirations had changed as much as
economic facts during the course of a prolonged period of what had been
called ‘total war’, and that what had been acceptable before 1939 would
not necessarily be tolerable after 1945, there were strong counter-currents
favouring less rather than more planning. If the view was widely held in
some circles that the frontiers of war-time planning should not roll back
but should serve as a strategic base for new advances, in others there was
strong dislike of all forms of dirigisme. In eastern Europe, Communism
provided yet another set of ideas and techniques, while, outside Europe,
new aspirations were beginning to influence policies, and the example
of the Soviet Union was attracting wider attention in the ‘undeveloped
world’ than it had done before 1939. Given this range of attitudes, opinions
1 Arndt, The Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties , p. 300.
2 W. Roepke, La crise de notre temps (Neuchatel, 1945); Internationale Ordnung
(Zurich, 1945); Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft (Zurich, 1946).
3 The preface to the English edition of L. Erhardt, Germany's Comeback in the World
Market (London, 1954).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
and policies, it was obvious that the concept of international inter-
dependence — a concept which had lost its universal meaning as the war-
time world was divided into two highly organised blocs in a state of mutual
blockade — would require new thinking in post-war conditions. ‘An inter-
national economic system which was based on the assumption of free
private enterprise in all countries and the free operation of market forces
the world over, which laid down rules that virtually lose all their meaning
if applied to planned economies, and which explicitly borrowed methods
of economic control that are essential instruments of planned economies,
would clearly stand little chance of universal acceptance.’ 1
From a later vantage-point, somewhat different lessons have been
drawn. It seemed for a time that the strains of adjustment after war and
the divisions between nations threatened not merely the reconstruction of
Europe but also material progress in general. By the end of the 1950s,
however, high rates of economic growth in Europe during the 1950s,
along with far-reaching moves towards greater integration, threw the
record of the inter-war years into sharp relief. The increase in productivity
achieved during the 1950s — anaverage of 3-5 per cent for twelve European
countries — was twice the average for the whole period from 1913 to i960.
Only the United States had previously achieved a comparable increase,
and the rate of increase had slowed down in the United States during the
1950s after a huge leap ahead during the second world war and the uneasy
post-war period of international predominance, when Europe heavily
depended on United States economic assistance. Throughout western
Europe the rate of increase in output for every man employed was above
that of any earlier period for which records were available, ‘By the time
that the decade ended, it had become clear that Western Europe was
reaping the benefit of a significant change of trend, and that the change
was not simply the reflection of a full employment policy which had put
more people to work.’ 2 It was not difficult in retrospect to claim that
during the 1930s Europe had been suffering from ‘the arterio-sclerosis of
an old established, heavily capitalised economic system inflexible in
relation to violent economic change. Low productivity in agriculture and
many manufacturing industries, and widespread unemployment kept
national output and income low, and blocked the road towards rapid
general expansion.’ 3
In a changed and changing context, economists paid less attention to
the economics of employment and more attention to the growth process,
in some countries going beyond the limits of the Keynesian revolution of
the 1 930s by taking it for granted, in others treating it as irrelevant.
1 Arndt, op. cit. p. 301.
8 A. Shonfield, Modern Capitalism (London, 1965), pp. 4-5. Shonfield’s figures are based
on Maddison, Economic Growth in the West. See also United Nations, Some Factors in
Economic Growth in Europe during the 1950s (Geneva, 1 964).
8 Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy, p. 52.
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American economists had pointed the way in this field : now European
economists took over. 1 Recognising that there were serious difficulties in
making long-term statistical comparisons, economists none the less began
to review historical experience, setting out their conclusions in tabulated
form:
Recent and long-term annual national growth rates 2
Long-term rate
Starting year
Rate
1950-9
1954-9
United Kingdom
1857
1-2
1-7
1-6
United States
1871
2-0
2-2
2-2
Germany
1853
i‘5
4’5
3-6
France
1855
1-5
3-6
3'3
Sweden
1863
21
2-8
3'0
Japan
1880
29
6-1
7-6
The margin of error increases the further back the figures go. At the same
time, the figures expose a number of widely held misconceptions about the
history covered in this chapter. There is little evidence to support the view
that a stable population has been an obstacle to growth. Moreover, despite
ambitious attempts at generalisation there is ‘no convincing evidence’ of
any constancy or pattern in the international pattern of growth rates : the
cataclysms of the past fifty years — two world wars and depression — have
seemingly distorted and modified national growth rates and not simply
interrupted trends. Nor can countries be separated out into those which
‘normally’ have grown fast and those which have not. With the significant
exception of Japan, 3 nearly all countries have had fairly long periods of
both rapid growth and of slow growth.
It is certainly too soon to find a satisfactory vantage-point from which
to view what happened before the second world war. What happened in
western Europe — and behind the averages there were substantial differences
in rates of growth and in competitive power — must be related to what
happened in eastern Europe and after 1917 in the Soviet Union: two
international economic systems are now involved, neither of which is
static. What happened in Europe as a whole must be related to what
1 S. Kuznets, Six Lectures on Economic Growth (Chicago, 1959); O. Aukrust, ‘Factors of
Economic Development: a Memoir of Recent Research’ ( Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv,
Band 93, 1964); P. D. Henderson (ed.), Economic Growth in Britain (London, 1966);
R. Nurkse, Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Areas (New York, 1953). The
pioneer locus classicus now became J. A. Schumpeter’s The Theory of Economic Development
(Cambridge, Mass., 1949): the German edition of this work had been published as early as
1911.
8 D. C. Paige, F. T. Blackaby and S. Freund, ‘Economic Growth, the Last Hundred
Years’, National Institute Economic Review (London, 1961).
8 For an explanation of the Japanese position, see K. Kojima, ‘Capital Accumulation
and the Course of Industrialisation with Special Reference to Japan’ ( Economic Journal ,
vol. lxx, i960); K. Ohkwa, The Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy since 1938 (Tokyo,
1957); W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan (2nd ed. Princeton, 1965).
8 83 NCM12
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happened outside Europe: after 1945 the growth in the number of
independent states, with their economic and political pressures, trans-
formed the modes and content of debate. What happened internally to
economies must be related to patterns of international trade. During
the 1950s the volume of trade in manufactures among industrial
countries increased faster than it had done in this century, faster than
production. 1 At the same time imports of manufactures by non-industrial
countries rose rapidly and by semi-industrial countries (including many
which had partially industrialised their economies during the second
world war) less fast. Exports from primary producing countries (with the
exception of oil) rose only slowly relatively to other sections in technology,
a factor which needs detailed and specific analysis. Through the period
since 1914 scientific industry in advanced countries has become less
dependent on the agricultural and mineral products of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, although over short periods, at least, it has
demanded and secured new products from ‘under-developed’ areas.
Another factor influencing movements of imports and exports has been
increasing demand for their own products, both food and materials, in the
primary producing countries themselves.
In the light of recent enquiries, the position during the 1920s and 1930s
may appear to be as unique and transient as was the position during the
nineteenth century. It has already been shown clearly, however, that in
changing circumstances expansion of trade between ‘developed’ and
‘developing’ countries depends on the easing of balance-of-payments
difficulties either through increases in exports from non-industrial or semi-
industrial countries or through loans and development grants. Much new
thinking in this connection has historical perspectives, since it represents
an extension in international terms of past thinking within individual
countries — both about income redistribution and planning — to offset
‘trends in inequalities’. 2 In the meantime, the net capital outflow from the
industrial countries to the non-industrial and semi-industrial countries in
1 958-60 represented only about 1 per cent of their gross national product : 3
this is a very small proportion as compared with United Kingdom exports
of capital in the period from 1900 to 1913. 4 (See table on p. 85.)
Given the growing suspicion in the developing countries after 1945 both
of privately supplied foreign capital and of governmental aid ‘with strings
attached’, mutually acceptable concepts of economic ‘interdependence’
in changing historical circumstances clearly needed to be redefined.
1 Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade , p. 384.
2 D. Seers, ‘International Aid: the Next Steps’, a paper read to the Dar-es-Salaam
Conference, 1964.
3 Maizels, op. cit. p. 412. See also R. Prebisch, ‘Towards A New Policy for Development’,
in Cmd. 2417 (1964), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development: Final Acts with
Related Documents.
1 A. K. Caimcross, Home and Foreign Investment, 1870-1913 (Cambridge, 1953), p. 180.
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Estimates of United Kingdom capital exports and the distribution
of overseas investment 1
Estimates of distribution of
investments (when known)
Net
national
Net
export
of
r
U.S.A. and
South
India
and
South
' '
Austra-
income
capital
Canada
America
Ceylon
Africa
lasia
1900
L 750
236
—
200
—
—
389
1902
1,740
9-8
205
(Argentine
only)
1911
2,076
I 7 I -3
(Canada
only)
1,061
587
351
351
380
1913
2,265
1982
1,270
722
379
—
—
As for ‘planning’, there have been so many changes since 1945 both in
theories and in techniques, objectives and policies, thatitis possible to argue
that planning is ‘an activity of very recent origin, belonging to the 1960s
rather than to the 1950s’. 2 In ‘boom’ conditions after 1950, long-term
planning, employing a variety of instruments, more or less sophisticated,
for the first time in years of peace began to be thought of in capitalist
societies as the planning of whole economies and not simply planning within
economies. In years of depression governments had resorted to ‘regulation
of single markets’ — with business groups often ‘willingly giving up more
freedom of action than was actually necessary’ and labour pressing for
intervention on ‘welfare’ grounds. 3 In the changed conditions of the
1950s and early 1960s ‘overall’ planning in some countries, at least,
began to take account not only of specific or short-range problems,
including balance-of-payments problems, but of general tendencies to-
wards distortions of market prices, of divergences between private and
social costs, and of the need for long-term forecasting. The idea of shaping
the development of an economy through ‘modernisation’ or through the
assessment and formulation of future ‘ national needs ’ began to win new
adherents. In countries like Germany and the United States, where there
was continued suspicion of enhanced governmental powers, there was a
development of planning techniques within large business firms, some-
times through the mediatorship of banks : here also there were ‘ lengthened
perspectives’, particularly in science-based industries, involving a sense of
1 The estimates of national income — those of C. H. Feinstein — are conveniently set out
in B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962),
pp. 367-8. The figures relating to the export of capital and the distribution of investments
are conveniently set out in Caimcross, op. cit. pp. 180, 185.
2 Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, p. 220.
2 A. J. Tinbergen, Shaping the World Economy (New York, 1962), p. 68.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
planning strategy . 1 It has become possible, indeed, to trace a process
whereby ‘managerial practices and attitudes in the public and private
sectors of most Western economies tend to become more similar ’. 2 At the
same time, the debate about economic planning in Communist societies has
been opened up to cover such questions as the development of a ‘less
irrational’ price structure, freedom of contract between enterprises, and
more direct links between producers and consumers . 3 And, just as a
process can be traced in capitalist countries which has led towards over-
lapping between private and public policies and practices, so there have
been some planning processes (particularly those involving large-scale
investment decisions) common to both capitalist and Communist countries.
Again, the smaller undeveloped countries, where planning is a con-
venient and attractive slogan, face the greatest difficulties in practice in
introducing planning in order to control their situation . 4 The minimum
size required to secure both economies of scale in industry and the
prospect of effective planning has risen as technology has changed and as
planning techniques have become more highly sophisticated . 5 What effect
this consideration will have on new forms of economic integration in the
future remains as uncertain as what form economic ‘interdependence’ will
eventually take.
1 J. B. Quinn and A. M. Cavanaugh, ‘Fundamental Research Can be Planned’, Harvard
Business Review (1964).
2 E. S. Mason (ed.). The Corporation in Modem Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 17.
a A. Nove, ‘Soviet Planning: Reforms in Prospect’, reprinted in Was Stalin Really
Necessary ? (London, 1964).
1 For some of the difficulties, see G. Myrdal, Economic Theory and Under-developed
Regions (London, 1 957).
6 E. A. G. Robinson (ed.). Economic Consequences of the Size of Nations (London, i960).
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CHAPTER IV
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
/is the nineteenth century drew to its end, the mechanism and pattern
ZA of Nature seemed to have been revealed to the scientist in broad
1 V outline; and his researches appeared to some degree, especially in
the physical sciences, to have assumed the form of investigations into a
structure that was more or less known and established by the work of
those who had gone before him. Scientific thought had already undergone
three great changes that are properly described as revolutions, since they
were no mere changes of emphasis but fundamental changes in outlook.
They had all been effected in modem times and in western Europe. The
seventeenth century had seen the revolution in mechanics and the founda-
tion of modem physics, begun by Galileo and completed by Newton and
marked particularly by the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687;
in the eighteenth century there came the revolution in chemistry, brought
about by Lavoisier’s classic experiments and associated, so far as such
events may be dated, with the publication of his Trait# elementaire de
chimie in 1789, a date which still conveniently marks the foundation of
modem chemistry; the revolution in biology was more recent, introduced
by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Biology had
not kept pace with the physical sciences, but it too now seemed at last to
have set out on its modem road ; and the scientific mind appeared to be
concerned at this period with what may be described in general terms as
an increasingly refined anatomy of nature. The world around us, it was
considered, was made up both in its living and in its non-living forms of
a number of chemical elements. About seventy-five were already known,
and it was recognised that there were probably others not yet discovered.
The elements consisted of eternal and indestructible atoms: the atoms
of any one element were alike and had the same weight, different from that
of the atoms of every other element. The protean nature of energy was
understood and its transformation from one form into another of its
numerous manifestations, into mechanical or thermal or chemical or
electrical energy, had been quantitatively determined in exact and refined
experiments. The framework of the world was apparently known.
In the last few years of the century, however, the situation suddenly
changed. In 1896 Becquerel discovered radioactivity and in 1899 Mme
Curie concluded that radioactive atoms were unstable and that in the
radioactive processes observed they were undergoing disintegration with
release of energy; and meanwhile in 1897 Sir J. J. Thomson showed that
the so-called cathode rays, discovered by Pliicker in 1859, consisted of
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submicroscopic particles carrying negative charges of electricity: since
they were produced in identical form from many different kinds of atoms,
these particles, which he called ‘corpuscles’, and which were later renamed
‘electrons’, were a common constituent of atoms. Atoms, therefore, were
not simple but composite; and some of them were unstable and disinte-
grating at measurable rates. These two discoveries, made at the very close
of the century, ushered in the fourth revolution in science in modem
times and opened to us the new world of atomic physics.
Science had, of course, been applied to some extent in industry even in
the seventeenth century and still more in the nineteenth, but such applica-
tion was not general and the links between science and technology were
not close. Many of those engaged in politics realised the importance of
scientific knowledge and its application in the modem world. Before the
nineteenth century closed A. J. (later Lord) Balfour remarked of scientists :
‘ They are the people who are changing the world and they don’t know it.
Politicians are but the fly on the wheel — the men of science are the motive
power.’ But it was the first world war that effectively demonstrated to the
modem nation-states and their governments the necessity of applied
science for their economic and military survival.
So the nineteenth century ended with a fundamental and revolutionary
change in the physical sciences and with some recognition that it was
science that was moulding the world of the future.
The first half of the twentieth century proved to be a period of advance
in science surpassing that of all preceding times in extent, in rapidity and
in application; and in these fifty years the harvest of four centuries of
modem science was reaped so thoroughly that it changed the whole aspect
and outlook of our civilisation as well as our daily lives and our habits of
thought. When men began some four hundred years ago to abandon the
older ways of thinking and speculating about Nature and her workings,
and to give up the practice of constructing systems of the world prematurely
on shreds of evidence, they turned instead to the limited objective. They
turned also to the ‘explanation’ that was to be accepted as ‘true’ — and
this merely in the provisional and scientific sense — only if it agreed with
indisputable and verifiable experimental fact. They had embarked upon a
new adventure, much as other men went on voyages of discovery; and
none could have foreseen that the knowledge that would ultimately be
gained would presently outstrip their organised political capacity to control
its application and to limit its use to beneficent ends, or that the customary
freedom enjoyed by scientists for centuries in the publication of their
discoveries would finally have to be taken from them in certain fields in
the interests of military security and national survival. In the period now
being discussed the invention of the internal combustion engine solved
the problem of heavier-than-air flight and so gave us the aeroplane with
its terrible powers of destruction in war; the advance of atomic physics
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has given us the atomic bomb, by which humanity holds in its own hands
the very means of its extermination, perhaps of the destruction of ‘ the
great globe itself’ with ‘all which it inherit’, or perhaps of the mutation
of living forms into new and monstrous evolutionary species. Man has
for the first time become the master of his fate.
From its very beginnings, of course, modem science has been of conse-
quence outside the study and the laboratory, beyond its immediate
frontiers and often far beyond them. In the physical sciences, the helio-
centric theory of Copernicus, set forth in his De revolutionibus orbium
caelestium in 1543, displaced the habitation of man from the centre of the
universe, about which the sun was believed to revolve for his benefit, to
a minor planet in the solar system and gave him a less dignified and less
important place in the material scheme of things ; and, more recently, in
the biological sciences, Darwin’s theory of evolution as propounded in
the Origin of Species in 1859 demonstrated man’s remote and humble
animal origin and removed him from his proud and privileged spiritual
position of being ‘a little lower than the angels’. From Copernicus to
Darwin, however, these and similar advances, with such consequences
on human thought and life as they might have, affected the minds of only
a very small minority of men and the daily lives of probably none of them.
The first half of the twentieth century brought great change in this respect;
through the spread of education and the multiplication of a great variety
of means for the popularisation and dissemination of scientific and techni-
cal knowledge, men and women of all classes everywhere, at least among
the democracies, became aware that their survival and alike their destruc-
tion depended on the progress of science, or on how their rulers or the
rulers of other peoples decided to apply that progress. These matters
became clearer, however, and grimmer in their dread reality at the end of
the second world war. We turn for the moment to earlier years and other
fields in the half-century.
In the last fifty years there has been an unparalleled increase in our
knowledge, not only of the complexity of the atom but also of the vastness
of the universe, not only of the infinitesimally minute but also of the
incomprehensibly great. When the century opened, the distances of only
about twenty stars were known with any reasonable accuracy. As a
result of the construction of new telescopes and of developments in photo-
graphy the distances of several thousands have been determined accurately
in the last half-century, and much has been learned thence about the size
and structure of the cosmic system. The completion of the great 100-inch
reflector telescope at Mount Wilson in California provided an instrument
with greatly increased light-gathering power; and it soon became clear
that there are galaxies other than our own, the so-called ‘ island universes ’,
to the number of about a hundred million, all about the same order of size
and all receding apparently from our universe, the Galactic System. The
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
nearest is some 500 million light-years distant from us, that is, at the
distance that would be traversed in 500 million years by light, which
travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. The astronomer has, indeed,
had to devise and adopt a new yardstick for his measurements, namely,
the ‘light-year’, the distance travelled by light in one year, in order that
he may be enabled to handle these huge and incomprehensible figures
conveniently. The expansion of our world in these fifty years is enormous;
its vast dimensions cannot be visualised by the human mind, and man,
though the astronomers may show him to be ‘a citizen of no mean city’,
finds his imagination incapable of realising its gigantic and colossal
grandeur. Our own ‘universe’ has a diameter now calculated at about
100,000 light-years.
Cosmic space, therefore, so far as the great modem telescopes have
probed, has been shown to contain an enormous number of ‘ island uni-
verses ’, all more or less of the same size and more or less evenly distributed.
Some of them appear to be still in process of condensation and formation
from glowing gaseous matter, or were so when the light by which our
telescopes detect their existence and their state left them hundreds of
millions of years ago on its long journey to our planet. Interstellar space,
for long thought to be void, appears to be far from empty, since it con-
tains much highly tenuous matter, this interstellar matter being compar-
able in amount with the stellar matter of the cosmos.
Much knowledge was gained during this half-century about the stars
and about their chemical constitution and their evolution. The existence
of ‘giants’ and of ‘white dwarfs’, which consist of very dense matter, as
much as 10 tons to the cubic inch, and of variables of different kinds has
been detected. It has also been shown that, in general, the main-sequence
stars consist in all probability mainly of the element hydrogen, from which
there are other reasons for supposing all the other chemical elements to
have been formed. The process of probing space continues with ever more
powerful telescopes, but the present century has already revealed much of
the structure of the vast universe, or system of ‘universes’, with some
knowledge of its evolution and its composition.
So far as this century has gone, these advances have brought an even
greater sense of the vastness of the world and have reduced mankind, at
least on the physical plane, to a creature of still more microscopic minute-
ness, yet taking such courage as he may in this awful immensity in which
he finds himself from the circumstance that it is his mind that has pene-
trated to some extent its remote depths.
The hundred million universes, it has been shown, are composed ulti-
mately, like man himself, of atoms, of those submicroscopic particles
which the present half-century, after some beginnings at the close of the
nineteenth century, has revealed as minute and complex worlds in them-
selves. Almost until 1900 the atom, in spite of the rise of a chemical
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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
atomic theory under John Dalton in the first decade of the nineteenth
century, was, so far as science was concerned, merely a hard solid un-
structured sort of infinitesimal billiard-ball, or, as Lucretius had described
it two thousand years earlier, solido atque aeterno corpore. In 1897-9
Sir J. J. Thomson detected the first component to be known in the structure
of the atom. This has since become familiar as the electron. Electrons
were identical in all atoms from which they were obtained; and they
proved to be particles carrying a negative charge of electricity, and pos-
sessing a mass very much smaller than that of a hydrogen atom, a mass
presently shown to be about 1/ 1,850th of that of a hydrogen atom. The
identification of a constituent common to all atoms recalled the dreams of
the alchemists about the transmutation of the elements, and such changes
were indeed effected later.
Shortly afterwards another particle was discovered in the structure of
the atom, a particle charged with positive electricity equal in amount to
the negative charge on the electron, and with a mass the same as that of
the hydrogen atom. It was called a proton. It appeared that the atoms
of the different chemical elements were formed of differently ordered
assemblages of electrons and protons, the number of electrons in the atom
of a particular element being the same as the number of protons, since
the atom as a whole was electrically uncharged.
Then in 19 1 1 Lord Rutherford introduced, to quote Sir Arthur Edding-
ton, ‘the greatest change in our idea of matter since the time of Demo-
critus’. In his researches on radioactivity Rutherford had shown that the
alpha rays, as they were called, which were emitted, like beta rays and
gamma rays, in radioactive disintegration were in fact not rays, but
positively charged helium atoms. Their mass was four times as great as that
of a proton and they carried a charge double that of the proton. Also they
moved at high speeds and had a high kinetic energy. They were known to
pass through matter easily because of their great velocity and high energy,
but Rutherford found that in so doing they occasionally suffered very
large deflections. He concluded therefore that the inside of the atom was
mostly empty, which would account for the observed fact that alpha
particles in general passed through matter without deflection, but that the
occasional deflections had been caused when the alpha particles had, in
traversing the atoms, approached near a small central and positively
charged nucleus or core. Thus the ancient solid atom, accepted from
Democritus to Dalton and even for a century after Dalton had propounded
his theory, was now revealed as a structure largely empty and consisting
of a minute but massive central nucleus, with a positive electrical charge,
surrounded at a distance by a peripheral shell of negatively charged elec-
trons — a kind of solar system in miniature. Matter seemed, therefore,
to be mostly empty space.
It appeared at the same time that protons and electrons, in some
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
instances, might form two slightly different structures with slightly different
atomic weights and therefore that the atoms of a given chemical element
might exist in two forms with slightly different atomic weights. Up to
this time the atomic weight of an element had been one of its supposedly
invariable characteristics; but for such chemically identical atoms, with
slightly different atomic weights but otherwise chemically indistinguish-
able, as now appeared to be possible, Soddy coined the name ‘isotopes’
in 1913 when he discovered the two isotopes of lead produced by the
radioactive decay of uranium and of thorium respectively. In the same
year J. J. Thomson in a study of positive rays discovered the isotopes
of neon; and by means of the ingenious mass-spectrograph F. W. Aston
showed in 1919 and in later years that most of the chemical elements
were mixtures of isotopes.
The discovery that all atoms possessed two constituents, and that atoms
differed chemically because of the different numbers of protons and
electrons of which they were composed, brought science back to the long-
rejected idea that matter was transmutable, a theory over which the
alchemists had spent their lives and their fortunes, or some part of the
fortunes of their patrons. Studies on radioactivity had already shown
that certain elements were gradually undergoing change and disintegra-
tion, that uranium slowly passed into lead through a very long period of
time and that thorium also underwent the same change. In other words,
certain elements were being ‘transmuted’, but neither by the methods of
the ancient alchemists nor according to their dreams; for, whereas they
had hoped to convert base lead into noble gold or silver. Nature was
slowly turning precious uranium into base lead. The first modem ‘trans-
mutation’ was achieved by Rutherford in 1919, when he succeeded in
obtaining hydrogen by bombarding certain light elements with alpha
particles, and thus in producing a simpler atom from a more complex one.
In 1922, however, Blackett concluded from similar experiments that
oxygen was produced in the bombardment of nitrogen atoms with alpha
particles, in this case a more complex atom being obtained from a less
complex one by a ‘transmutation’ in which there was a building up rather
than a breaking down. The rapid development of this work, by means of
the cyclotron and later the atomic pile, has brought about many other
transmutations: it has even led to the production of new elements, the
so-called ‘trans-uranic elements’, those that fall beyond the heaviest
element, uranium, in the chemist’s Periodic Table. These new elements,
such as neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium and cali-
fornium, were first produced in the laboratory; some of them have since
been detected in minute proportions in pitchblende. The significant ad-
vance, however, is that the atomic physicist has, in this half-century, not
merely transmuted elements but also produced artificial or synthetic
ones.
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Further striking advances in this field have led to the production of a
number of radioactive, that is, unstable, isotopes of known elements, a
result that has found many valuable applications. One that may be specially
mentioned in passing is the use of radioactive carbon, or radio-carbon
as this isotope of carbon is often called, in physiology and in medicine,
whereby this substance may be traced in its passage through the organism
by means of the external photographic detection of its radioactivity.
The use of radio-carbon has led also to the remarkable discovery that
animal tissue shares with plant tissue what was long regarded as a unique
function of the latter, namely, the utilisation of carbon dioxide, previously
regarded as a waste product, in the building up of more complex substances ;
and it has also been shown that the oxygen evolved in photosynthesis
by green plants under the action of light does not come, as was formerly
supposed, from the decomposition of the carbon dioxide absorbed by the
plant, but from the decomposition of water.
Since atoms, therefore, appeared to be assemblages of electrons and
protons, every atom being electrically neutral because it was composed of
an equal number of both kinds of particles, and since the proton had
a mass about 1,800 times as great as that of the electron and, in fact, a mass
that was practically equal to that of the hydrogen atom, it seemed that the
proton, or perhaps the hydrogen atom, might be akin to the protyle or
primary matter of the Greeks, from which all matter and therefore all
atoms were made. A form of this ancient idea had been revived in the
second decade of the nineteenth century by William Prout, a London
medical practitioner, who had based his views on the somewhat inadequate
evidence at his command that the atomic weights of the elements were
whole numbers on the scale in which the weight of the atom of hydrogen
was taken as unity — whereas, in fact, many of them were not integral.
Prout thought that he had discovered in hydrogen the stuff of which all
atoms and therefore all matter was composed, but for the moment the
facts were against the acceptance of his hypothesis, although much time
and exact experiment were given to further determinations of such impor-
tant numbers as the atomic weights of the chemical elements. But in 191 1
Barkla, in his studies on the scattering of X-rays, showed that the number
of electrons in a particular atom corresponded to its place in the chemist’s
Periodic Table, in which the elements fall into well-defined series and
groups when arranged in the ascending order of their atomic weights. In
1913-14 Moseley showed that the number of units of positive electricity
(protons) on the nucleus of the atom of a chemical element gave its
‘atomic number’, which was, with certain exceptions — all long-standing
anomalies — nothing more or less than its numerical position in the
Periodic Table. In the modern form of the Periodic Table, subsequent to
Moseley’s work, the elements are arranged not in order of their atomic
weights, but in that of their atomic numbers, since the latter are more
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fundamental, different isotopes of the same element having the same
atomic number, and there are no anomalies.
Already, in 1901, Strutt had been attracted to Prout’s hypothesis; and
he had examined the eight most accurately determined atomic weights and
shown mathematically that the probability of the total deviation of these
atomic weights from a whole number being as great as found by experi-
ment was about 1 in 1,000. He then examined in the same way a further
eighteen other atomic weights which could not be so reliably determined,
and concluded : ‘A calculation of the probabilities involved fully confirms
the verdict of common-sense, that the atomic weights tend to approximate
to whole numbers far more closely than can reasonably be accounted for
by any accidental coincidence. The chance of any such coincidence being
the explanation is not more than 1 in 1 ,000, so that, to use Laplace’s modes
of expression, we have stronger reasons for believing in the truth of some
modification of Prout’s Law, than in that of many historical events which
are universally accepted as unquestionable.’ 1 The discovery of the electron
and the proton as common constituents of all atoms, with the consequent
revelation of atomic structure, and the remarkable discovery by Moseley
of ‘atomic numbers’, seemed in the 1920s to have proved the truth of that
‘modification of Prout’s Law’ foreshadowed in Strutt’s conclusion, that
the hydrogen atom in the form of its nucleus, the proton, was the primary
stuff, so far as mass was concerned, of which all matter was made. And
later came the conclusion that the main-sequence stars consist, in all
probability, mainly of hydrogen, which therefore began to reveal itself
as the protyle of the Greeks, the basis of all matter, terrestrial and celestial,
although, of course, the Greeks excluded celestial matter as being of a
different and permanent and unchanging nature. But, so far as the atom
was concerned, simplicity soon disappeared with the discovery of funda-
mental component particles other than the proton and the electron,
namely: the neutron (Chadwick, 1932), an uncharged particle with a mass
equal to that of the proton; the positron (Anderson, 1933), with a mass
equal to that of the electron, but a positive, instead of a negative, charge;
a variety of mesons, particles with a short life and positively or negatively
charged with electricity or even neutral; and, possibly, the neutrino, a
neutral particle of very small mass. The structure of the atom, at first
apparently simple, has since proved to be complex; and, although the
atom now seems to be almost a cosmos in itself, its complex constitution
and its fine structure have in these fifty years become subjects of experi-
mental investigation.
Increasing knowledge of the atom and of its structure has largely broken
down the barriers between the sciences of physics and chemistry. The
terms ‘atomic physics’ and ‘chemical physics’ have come into use for
special fields that overlap two sciences that are really but one, while at the
1 Philosophical Magazine, 1901, vol. 1, series vi, pp. 313-14.
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same time mathematics has entered into the science of chemistry to play
almost as great a part as it plays in that of physics. Other developments
associated with the study of living matter have brought into being the
sciences of biochemistry and, more recently, biophysics. In biochemistry,
in its brief half-century as an offshoot of chemistry, probably the
most important advance was Gowland Hopkins’s discovery of what were
at first called the ‘ accessory food factors ’ and later known as the vitamins,
those substances without which a diet, although it may supply ample
energy to the organism, is inadequate for the maintenance of health. The
vitamins, in small amount, are necessary ingredients of our daily bread ;
their absence causes what have been called the ‘deficiency diseases’, such
as rickets, scurvy and so on. It is now known, for example, that Scott’s
South Polar Expedition (19 10-12) was equipped with a diet satisfactory
with regard to the energy that it would provide, but deficient in vitamin
content, and that the expedition’s tragic end was due to this cause. The
results of the discovery of the vitamins and of wide development of know-
ledge in this field have brought inestimable benefit to the health of nations.
Today some of these substances are in fact produced on the manufactur-
ing scale. Another important group, essential to life and health, the
hormones, produced in certain glands in the body and carried by the blood-
stream to their points of action, was also discovered in this period by
Bayliss and Starling (1902). Adrenaline was isolated by Takamine in 1901
from the suprarenal glands and thyroxine from the thyroid gland by
Kendall in 1915. Insulin, isolated by Banting and Best from the pancreas
in 1922, proved of great value in the treatment of diabetes mellitus;
cortisone, from the adrenal cortex, isolated by Kendall in 1936, is being
applied in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis; and there are others, and
some have been synthetised and some prepared on the manufacturing scale.
While the germ theory of infection had satisfactorily established itself,
it now became clear that there are other and more minute agents of
disease, namely, the ultra-filterable viruses, which can reproduce them-
selves only in living tissue. Some of these viruses, from plants, were
isolated by Stanley in 1935 as crystals; they were found to be mostly
complex protein substances or nucleo-proteins. The question of whether
they are living matter is not yet capable of clear decision.
In organic chemistry, progress continued at an ever increasing pace.
The characteristic work of the ‘ classical ’ organic chemist advanced farther
in the isolation of substances that occur in or are associated with living
matter, in the determination of their structure and their subsequent syn-
thesis in the laboratory, and often in their production on the manu-
facturing scale if they proved of industrial or medical importance. Other
organic chemists successfully applied the electronic theory of valency and
molecular structure to chemical changes in order to explain the mechanism
of the reactions between organic substances, which had previously found
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little or no explanation in the electro-chemical terms that had long been
used and applied in inorganic chemistry. Thus, the nineteenth century
closed with the science of chemistry, the science of which it is justly said
that it affects our daily lives more than any other science does, divided
into two distinct fields, organic chemistry on the one hand, and physical
and inorganic chemistry on the other. The first half of the twentieth
century, by this wide application to organic chemistry of the methods and
theories of physical chemistry, has seen a unification of these two great
fields of chemistry, which is but part of that wider unification of the sciences
of physics and chemistry that characterises the period.
A number of investigators in this half-century succeeded in the prepara-
tion of new drugs with the property of being deadly to bacteria and other
organisms of disease infecting the higher animals, while being generally
harmless to the host. The problem was approached deliberately and it was
clear that it would be difficult. The component that would deal with the
bacteria or other organisms must be combined with some other molecular
group to form a new molecular grouping that would be innocuous to the
host but yet retain the bactericidal properties of the first component. One
of the first of these new drugs to be prepared was salvarsan, obtained by
Paul Ehrlich in 1909. It was fatal to the spirochaete of syphilis, but harm-
less to the subject; it revolutionised the treatment of this disease. Sal-
varsan was an organic compound of arsenic; the long and patient research
involved in the prosecution of a problem of this kind is indicated by the
fact that Ehrlich prepared over six hundred compounds by elaborate
syntheses before obtaining a product possessing the requisite properties.
Other similar drugs for the treatment of such tropical diseases as sleeping
sickness followed: but it was not until 1935 that Domagk showed that
streptococcal infections could be treated in a similar way by means of
prontosil, a red organic dye-substance. After it had been realised that
the effective part of the prontosil molecule was the sulphonamide group,
the new drug, known as ‘M and B 693’, or sulphapyridine, was syn-
thetised by Ewins and Phillips and applied in 1938 in the treatment of
pneumonia and other ‘killing diseases’. It has so greatly reduced the
mortality from pneumonia that Osier’s term for this formerly dreaded
disease, ‘Captain of the Men of Death’, a phrase which he derived from
John Bunyan, is no longer applicable. The sulphonamide drugs have
also proved an effective remedy in puerperal fever. The discovery of the
antibacterial properties of penicillin by Fleming in 1929, and its successful
development as an antibiotic by Chain and Florey in 1940, placed another
powerful weapon in the hands of the physician. It was presently produced
on the commercial scale. Other antibiotics followed, including strepto-
mycin, chloramphenicol and aureomycin, which have been used with
success in the treatment, respectively, of some forms of tuberculosis, of
typhus, and of virus diseases.
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In the realm of crystallography, the chemical architecture of the molecule
has been laid bare by physical methods in the pioneer work of Sir William
Bragg and his son. Sir Lawrence Bragg, who devised the method of using
a crystal as a diffraction grating for X-rays. From the spectra thus given,
the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal molecule could be deduced. In
this fascinating revelation of the patterns in which Nature builds, physics
and chemistry have again combined ; and the work of the Braggs and their
pupils and other crystallographers has shown once again that these two
sciences have become so closely linked as to be essentially one.
The discovery of the hormones, secretions of the ductless glands, as well
as advances in our knowledge of the detailed chemical mechanism of the
process of respiration, have been important developments in physiology
in these fifty years. In neuro-physiology progress has been equally
striking, especially Sherrington’s researches on the integrative action of
the nervous system. Dale’s on the humoral transmission of nervous
impulses and Adrian’s on peripheral nerves. In physiology, and in the
related science of histology, the instruments of the physical scientist have
been partly responsible for the increased rate of progress ; of these we may
mention only X-ray diffraction methods and the improvements in micro-
scopic technique, especially the ultra-microscope in the earlier part of
this period and more recently the electron microscope.
Geology is another science in which the techniques of physics and
chemistry have been widely brought into use in this present century, on
the purely scientific side in elucidating the problems of geochemistry,
and on the practical side in locating sources of valuable raw materials
beneath the earth’s crust. Today the geologist is called upon for scientific
advice on many problems of our modem civilisation, apart from the
location of new sources of raw materials for industry: water-supplies,
building materials, the nature of soil and its suitability for various pur-
poses, the sites for roads and houses. The study of the atmosphere by
sending up carriers of recording instruments ranging from kites to the more
recent powered rocket has shown that it consists of three very different
layers : the troposphere, or lowest layer, a region of much movement and
not of uniform temperature extending from the surface of the earth to
a vertical height of about six miles ; the stratosphere, above the troposphere
and at a uniform temperature; and, above this, the ionosphere, beginning
about thirty miles above the earth’s surface and extending a further one
hundred and twenty miles, increasingly ionised towards the upper layers
and affecting the transmission of wireless waves, which it reflects. The
circulation of the atmosphere and the formation of clouds have been
increasingly studied, together with the many changes in this complex
system. It appears that the causes of rain and snow and the formation of
ice are not as simple as they were once supposed to be.
The search for sources of power, for coal and oil, has needed the services
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of the geologist, once the haphazard exploitation of former days had
exhausted obvious supplies. The use of physical methods, such as the
reflection of percussion or electromagnetic waves (wireless waves), or
measurement of the minute changes in electric or gravitational fields, has
been introduced to locate oil, water and a variety of minerals beneath
the earth’s surface. An interesting development in geological thought,
in geophysics, was propounded in Wegener’s theory of continental drift
in 1915, to explain the distribution of the great land masses, the continents,
on the earth’s surface. Evidence was adduced to show that the various
continents had in remote times gradually separated and drifted apart from
one original land mass. The theory long remained a subject of lively
debate but its acceptance was far from general.
However, it was the study of radioactivity that in the early years of this
century provided the geologist with a reliable means of dating the forma-
tion of many of the strata that he studies. By laboratory measurements the
physicist had established the rate of disintegration of radioactive sub-
stances, for example, into helium and radium-lead (an isotope of ordinary
lead). It remained only to measure the proportion of lead and helium
in radioactive minerals to establish the age of the rocks in which these
minerals occurred. By this means, the geologist was shown to be correct in
the estimates that he had made on purely geological data for the great age
of many of the rocks, namely, hundreds of millions of years; indeed, the
‘geological time’ that he had demanded was in some cases now granted
to him in overflowing measure without the scepticism that had on occasion
formerly accompanied it. The passing of the half-century has also seen
the geologist concerned in the location of sources of uranium and other
elements of high atomic weight. The production of the atomic bomb at
the close of the second world war, and the hopes of applying and develop-
ing the use of atomic energy, have led to an almost world-wide search for
the necessary basic materials.
Meteorology is another science that calls to its aid the instruments of
physics and chemistry; with these, more reliable daily weather forecasts
have been made available, and mariners can be forewarned of bad
conditions and farmers advised of good. State meteorological stations
have been established by all civilised nations, and are a necessity for
air travel, while the increased rapidity of communication brought about
by means of wireless telegraphy has made more immediately available
the data necessary for accurate forecasting of weather conditions.
But it is in physics itself that the most profound changes in scientific
thought have occurred. While the nineteenth century closed with a firm
belief in Newtonian mechanics, the researches of Max Planck on the
radiation of heat disproved the older belief that energy was equally dis-
tributed among the different wave-lengths in which it was radiated by a
black body; and energy appeared to be not continuous, as had been
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supposed, but discontinuous, discrete, almost corpuscular, so that it might
be regarded as released in units or quanta. Where v is the frequency of the
emitted radiation and h a universal constant, which Planck called the
‘quantum of action’, the amount of quantity of energy emitted by a
radiating body might be represented as the product of h and v, or hv.
Planck’s quantum theory and his constant h have revolutionised the physi-
cist’s ideas on energy. Moreover, the development of the Special and
the General Theory of Relativity by Einstein has shown that the energy
(£) of a body is proportional to its mass (m) according to the relation
E = me 2 , where c is the velocity of light in vacuo. Mass and energy have
therefore lost their once so obvious difference and are now seen to be one
and the same thing, or perhaps both imperfect expressions of one and the
same incompletely understood idea, so that the laws of conservation of
mass and of energy — the establishment of the latter being one of the great
triumphs of the physics of the second half of the nineteenth century —
really express the same idea from two different points of view. Indeed,
the energy received from the sun may be largely due to the loss of mass
that occurs when helium is formed from hydrogen, the change occurring
in the sun, which is considered to produce the energy that it radiates.
With the rise of the Special Theory of Relativity, absolute space and
time, together with the old mechanical ether, have been abandoned ; and,
under the Special Theory of Relativity, gravitation and electromagnetism
(and light also, which was shown to be an electromagnetic phenomenon
by Clerk Maxwell in 1873) have been unified in a new form of ‘field
physics’. The Newtonian world has been replaced by the four-dimensional
space-time continuum; and thus the whole physical picture of the world
has been changed, but rather by an extension than by an abandonment of
Newtonian principles. The emission of light, too, since it is essentially a
radiation, is discrete and it is emitted in units named photons. Since,
however, earlier in this century light was considered to have the properties
both of a wave and a particle, there was considerable development in the
study of wave mechanics with the consequence that wave phenomena
were recognised as statistical probabilities, as had also appeared in the
study of heat radiation. Indeed, the statistical view, the view that a
phenomenon occurs because it is the most probable among a number
of possibilities, became widely applied in physics during the period with
which we are here concerned.
The biological sciences have exhibited during this half-century a pro-
liferation similar to that of the physical sciences; and genetics, which is
concerned with heredity and variation, has developed so extensively that
it is to be regarded as a science in itself, especially since, unlike physiology
and biochemistry, it does not depend on the techniques of the physical
sciences. When the century opened, it was realised that Mendel, whose
work had begun at least as early as 1857 and had subsequently escaped
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the recognition that it properly deserved, had already discovered and
established the principles of heredity experimentally. The situation was
interesting. Darwin in his Origin of Species in 1859 had expanded the
idea that he had put forward in collaboration with Alfred Russel Wallace
in 1 858 about a mechanism of organic evolution, namely, natural selection :
it was in fact embodied in the full title of his book, The Origin of Species
by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life. But Darwin’s theory had been expressed in terms of
small continuous variations and, before the nineteenth century closed,
biologists had turned preferably to discontinuous variations or, as they
were named, mutations. The theory of natural selection, oversimplified
as ‘the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence’, was presently
supplemented by the explanation that ‘ particulate’ inheritance, or Mendel-
ian inheritance, is conveyed and controlled by the mechanism of genes —
inherited factors or units existing in any individual in pairs, one derived
from each parent. The genes are carried in the chromosomes of the cells
and follow the Mendelian laws of inheritance. Probably the most impor-
tant development in biology in this half-century has been the subsequent
integration of Mendel’s principles of heredity with the theory of natural
selection.
In Mendelian genetics the hereditary units have been shown to maintain
their identity, whereas Darwin had supposed that these factors blended.
The advances of the recent half-century have now made it clear that
evolution is governed by selection acting on Mendelian or ‘particulate’
inheritance, and in this way Darwinism has been more widely accepted in
a new form. As for such theories of evolution as that of Lamarck, who
based his ideas on the inheritability of acquired characters, such as might
be produced by use or disuse, and who supposed that it was these changes
induced in organisms that controlled the process of evolution, these views
have in the second quarter of this century found wider acceptance in the
Soviet Union for political reasons and not for their scientific validity.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century an increasing number of
finds of the fossil remains of Neanderthal man helped to establish the fact
of human evolution. Then Pithecanthropus was found in Java in 1891
and afterwards Sinanthropus near Peking; in 1900 it was generally con-
sidered that Neanderthal man arose at some point between Pithec-
anthropus, the most ancient fossil form recovered, and homo sapiens, or
modem man. In 1912 the famous Piltdown remains were found, since
shown to have been the greatest scientific hoax ever perpetrated. The
Steinheim skull, found in 1933, and the Swanscombe (Kent) skull found
in 1935, together with numerous other finds, led to the rejection of Nean-
derthal man from the line of descent of homo sapiens, and to his relegation
as an extinct offshoot. Many other varieties of human remains have come
to light in this half-century, notable among these being Australopithecus
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from South Africa, found in 1925 and combining in remarkable ways the
characteristics of man and ape. The descent of homo sapiens has, however,
remained a problem.
The applications of science to medicine have been many and various
in the period that we are here surveying. At the beginning of the century
Ronald Ross had demonstrated that malaria was carried by mosquitoes
that had bitten malaria patients and Reed in 1900 showed that the deadly
yellow fever was similarly transmitted. These discoveries led to the control
of the breeding places of the mosquito as a means of preventing these
diseases and opened up large territories to cultivation and settlement:
a spectacular result of the work on yellow fever was that it arrested the
disease that had prevented the construction of the Panama Canal. In the
treatment as opposed to the prevention of malaria, many new anti-
malarial synthetic drugs have replaced quinine. Artificial immunisation
was greatly developed also in this period: typhoid fever, hitherto the
scourge of armies, had a negligible incidence in the first world war, and
since then diphtheria has been similarly reduced. From 1940 onwards
blood transfusion became a normal hospital procedure through improve-
ment in the system of determining the blood group of the patient. One
scientific discovery after another has been pressed into the service of
medicine, notably X-ray photography.
The most significant change in our half-century from the point of view
of technology is probably that we have separated ourselves from the horse
and taken to the internal combustion engine in the motor-car and the
aeroplane. The motor-car dates from the last decade of the nineteenth
century, but it came into general use only after the first world war. The
first aeroplane flight powered by petrol was that made by the Wright
brothers in 1903 ; they flew 284 yards. In 1909 Colonel Bleriot flew across
the Straits of Dover. The first world war provoked development and
design in aircraft; and in 1919 Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic from
west to east, while in the same year a passenger service between London
and Paris was started. Successful helicopters and jet-engined aircraft date
from the second world war, the demands of which, like those of the first
world war, led to intensive development of this still novel and promising
weapon.
In 1947 an aeroplane first flew faster than sound travels in air; and in
the same year a flight of about 20,000 miles was made around the world.
Long flights became common and large passenger aeroplanes were built.
In another development of flight during the second world war flying bombs
and rocket bombs were devised. Researches on rockets led to further
speculations on the possibilities of flight to the moon, and of inter-
planetary and even of space travel; and the sending out of artificial earth-
satellites carrying recording instruments fitted with radio-transmitters
was planned.
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The internal combustion engine has replaced the horse where he was
most familiar, namely, on the farm; and in this half-century, more par-
ticularly in the later part of it, the plough and all other agricultural
implements have been powered by tractors. Much toil and drudgery have
thus been avoided for both men and animals. In the home similar saving
of labour has been achieved by the aid of electricity, especially in the
working of the suction cleaner or so-called vacuum cleaner, and the washing
machine, and also by the use of gas and of electricity for heating in place of
coal.
Electricity has replaced gas as an illuminant in this period both in the
home and in the factory, where also it has become the usual source of
power. Its production on the large scale in hydro-electric plants — the
so-called ‘ white coal ’ from ‘ falling water ’ — is now widespread where there
is a sufficient supply and ‘head’ of water, that is, in hilly or mountainous
rainy districts. Such schemes have carried electricity to the remote
countryside as well as to the great cities ; and in the later part of this half-
century many countryfolk have in their homes passed from wood or coal
or oil as fuel, and oil as an illuminant, to the use of electric power, without
passing through the intermediate use of gas as did their fellows in the
towns. In the same period electricity has brought broadcasting and tele-
vision to town and country. The advance was rapid. In 1897 Marconi
sent a message by wireless telegraphy a distance of eighteen miles, and in
1901 signals were successfully passed across the Atlantic. In the 1920s
radio-broadcasting became general and it was followed by television after
the second world war.
Wireless telephony was but another of those scientific inventions that
men have misused. It might have been applied to break down the mis-
understandings across frontiers. It all seemed so remarkable at first, and
‘nation shall speak to nation’ seemed about to be realised. When the
nations did speak to each other by this medium, however, it was fre-
quently the propaganda leading up to the second world war that they
spoke, and the ‘air’ was often filled with raucous argument or, as some
of them ensured by a warped sense of technology, noisy with the hideous
blare with which they ‘jammed ’ their rivals to prevent them from being
heard by their own nationals. Statesmen and political leaders used this
new method of communication to speak to audiences of nations; by its
means messages could be passed to and from ships at sea and many lives
were thus saved; and it had much to do with the urbanising of the
countryman. Radio and television have proved valuable aids to education
in the schools. They have brought the music, literature and art of the ages
into the home and within the reach of the individual, even to his bedside
when he is ill or old. But the control and the use of these great inventions
with their almost boundless possibilities for the improving of men’s
minds have been and still are challenged and fought over by those who
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are more concerned with mass entertainment than with the preservation
and dissemination of man’s cultural inheritance. Science and technology,
at last closely linked in our time, have lavished their gifts on a civilisation
too immature to appreciate and use them properly.
The rapidity of modem technological advance, following the equally
swift strides of modem science, is nowhere so evident as in the tapping
of the vast source of energy in the atom. When Rutherford, first of the
modem alchemists, in 1919 succeeded in transmuting certain light ele-
ments into hydrogen by bombarding them with the swift alpha particles
emitted in the disintegration of radium, and Blackett in 1922 effected a
similar transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, these changes took place
on a minute scale, because only a very small proportion of the atoms
subjected to the bombardments underwent transmutation. But in 1931
Cockcroft and Walton in Cambridge developed an improved method for
effecting such changes by means of a high-voltage apparatus; and Law-
rence, working in the University of California, devised the cyclotron, the
justly so-called ‘atom-smasher’, for obtaining charged particles with a
high energy without the difficulty of using correspondingly high voltages.
This ingenious contrivance was most successful. In 1932 Chadwick dis-
covered the neutron as a further component in the structure of the atom,
electrically neutral and with a mass equal to that of the proton. Fermi
in 1933-4 showed that neutrons were very effective in atomic transmuta-
tions and that many new radioactive elements could be produced by
bombarding various atoms with neutrons; and it was found that radio-
active isotopes could be produced for all the chemical elements. In
January 1939 Hahn and Strassmann in Germany reported that by bom-
barding uranium with neutrons they had obtained an isotope of barium,
an element far removed from uranium and with an atomic number of 46,
whereas that of uranium was 92. These atomic numbers, as we have seen,
represent the nuclear charges of the atoms. It therefore appeared that
something entirely new had been observed. This bombardment had not
produced the usual result of merely removing from or adding to the
bombarded nucleus one of the familiar particles such as a proton or an
electron or an alpha particle : on the contrary, it had split the nucleus into
two parts — atomic fission had at last been achieved.
The significance of this discovery was at once realised by scientists
throughout the world. The opening of the second world war brought with
it, however, the usual precautions of military secrecy, although the full
possibilities of what had happened were not at first appreciated by the
governments involved in the conflict. Within three years complete secrecy
had been imposed and a team of physicists, American, British and Cana-
dian, was officially organised to exploit the discovery of atomic fission for
use in war. This application was no longer a scientific but rather an
engineering problem. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima
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on 6 August 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later. The
governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada had kept
secret the technical information necessary for the manufacture of these
atomic bombs; they had kept it from their allies, including the Soviet
Union, and there was much criticism and resentment shown by the latter
when this policy became clear and when it was maintained even after the
conclusion of the war. Those who had been allies now split into two camps,
one struggling to overtake the other’s technical advance; and there were
some ‘leakages’ of secret information and deliberate breaches of trust for
political reasons. In six and a half years the application of the discovery
of atomic fission, expedited by the exigencies of total war, divided the
world in a race for technological superiority in the perfection of an
offensive weapon capable of measureless material destruction and of
shearing off whole nations in swift extermination. The democracies, com-
prising the United States of America and the nations of the British
Commonwealth and of western Europe, were well ahead in 1945; but
within another five years the Soviet Union narrowed this lead, and made
and tested the first of a series of atomic bombs. In this uneasy tension
civilisation faced a menace that seemed irremediable.
On the other hand, the sudden discovery of the availability of atomic
energy brought a new source of power within the reach of those nations
whose scientists were equipped to deal with such a problem and whose
resources included the necessary materials, particularly uranium. Here
again advance has been rapid; and, shortly after the close of the period
with which this chapter is concerned, power stations supplying atomic
energy were in operation.
The discovery of atomic fission had another and a quite different conse-
quence, but this time within the world of science itself. From the begin-
nings of modem science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scientists
had published their work without any interference or censorship or ban
by their rulers or governments. Now matters stood differently, and for
the first time. Knowledge in a particular field of science, a branch of
atomic physics, became of such vital interest to governments for the
survival and military security of their peoples that it was declared secret,
and those who worked in this field, mostly, of course, in special establish-
ments and laboratories set up for that work, were forbidden to publish
or communicate their work to others. Science, which had long and rightly
boasted that it knew no frontiers, had to adjust itself to changed circum-
stances.
Developments in technology have been so numerous and so varied that
any attempt at an inclusive summary would soon degenerate into a mere
catalogue of invention, and so we shall refer only to a few of the more
important. Metallurgical progress, for instance, has been most marked,
especially in the production of a great variety of alloy steels. The special
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use of silicon steel in the cores of electromagnets dates from 1903 and
effected considerable economies in electric power. Stainless steel, an alloy
with chromium, has saved much domestic labour and has been of great
benefit to the surgeon. Alloys with manganese, tungsten, nickel, vanadium,
cobalt and molybdenum have added to the variety of metallic products
necessary to our complex modem engineering; and in their different
proportions there are some thousands of such alloys of steel with these
different metals. This half-century has seen also a considerable develop-
ment and application of the alloys of the light metals, notably of aluminium
alloys for the aircraft industry. Aluminium, apart from its valuable quality
of lightness, is particularly useful because of its further property of
resistance to atmospheric corrosion by means of the thin film of protective
oxide that is immediately formed on the clean surface of the metal when
it is exposed to the air.
The pneumatic tyre, with all that it has meant to motor transport, has
been mainly developed in this period ; and a wide range of synthetic rubber
substitutes with different properties was produced from 1930 onwards.
The first commercially produced plastic, bakelite, was made in 1908
and its production marked the beginning of what became a considerable
industry: these plastics, or synthetic resins, are now so widely applied for
many purposes to replace stone and wood and metal that one has only
to look around to see them almost everywhere. Perspex, the first plastic
to replace glass, was discovered in 1930, and polythene, a flexible plastic,
came into production in 1939. Other plastics have been found useful as
wrapping materials and electrical insulators.
Nylon, which can be formed into a thread and which replaced artificial
silk as a fabric, dates from 1935. The earliest of these artificial fabrics,
rayon, dates from the beginning of the century; it was followed in turn by
cellulose acetate and then nylon; and towards the end of our period
terylene proved successful.
Atmospheric nitrogen has been fixed by various industrial processes
in the form either of nitric acid or of ammonia. The success of these
processes proved of great benefit to agriculture and to the explosives
industry, and brought to an end their dependence on such natural sources
as the mineral nitrates of Chile. The successful invention of one of these
processes in Germany is said to have been a factor in the decision to make
war in 1914, since it appeared to indicate that an adequate future supply
of nitric acid for the manufacture of explosives was assured even if imports
from Chile were cut off.
Many new and improved dyestuffs have been manufactured in this
period and they have added colour and variety to fabrics. Photography
has been greatly improved with plates and films of varying sensitivity for
different purposes ; and what was at first a difficult and complicated process
has passed successfully into the hands of countless amateurs. Insecticides
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in great variety have been invented, the best known probably being
DDT, but careless or too general use of such remedies is said to destroy
the pollinating insects as well as those that prey on the crops to be pro-
tected. Selective weed-killers, that destroy the weeds and leave the crop
undamaged, have also been devised.
While the volume of agricultural production has steadily increased in
this half-century by the application of scientific knowledge, the human
race has multiplied even faster, and frequent warnings have been sounded
that in a world populated by over 2,000 millions of people, increas-
ing annually by 20 millions, a mere 1 per cent, disastrous shortages of
food may well lie round the comer. In the West food supplies have so
far proved adequate for an increasing population; in the East, however,
this is, in general, so far from being so that birth-control has been recom-
mended as the only solution against a threat of famine. The bringing into
cultivation of hitherto untilled land has proceeded steadily, especially in
those marginal areas where rainfall and temperature are only just sufficient
for agriculture; and remedies for loss of soil by erosion, as in the ‘dust-
bowls’ of America, have been scientifically and successfully applied. In
the later years of this half-century, however, surplus stocks of food have
been amassed in some countries, with the threat of dangerous or even
ruinous falls in prices, while at the same time the populations of whole
tracts of the world have been underfed.
In the preservation of food, an important discovery in the refrigeration
of meat carried in ships was applied in 1934. Two methods had long been
in use: either the meat was frozen about ten degrees below the freezing-
point of water, in which state it could be conveyed satisfactorily for great
distances, for example, from Australia and New Zealand to Europe; or
it was chilled to just below the freezing-point of water, and then it could
be carried only for shorter distances, such as from America to Europe.
Frozen meat deteriorated rapidly on being thawed, while chilled meat
retained its quality and flavour but not its colour. It was discovered,
however, that, if 10 per cent of carbon dioxide was added to the air in
which the dulled meat travelled, the length of time in which it might be
stored in this way was doubled, while the addition of a proportion
of oxygen prevented the change of colour. This useful discovery was
applied to other cargoes than meat in suitably adjusted atmospheres at the
temperatures found necessary for these different products.
The domestic refrigerator is another invention that has come into
common use in this period; and the so-called ‘deep-freeze’ for fruit and
vegetables has followed it in preference to drying methods, the frozen
materials preserving much of their freshness although only for a short
time after thawing.
Ships have passed from coal to oil and from the steam engine to the
steam turbine, which was first applied to drive a ship in 1894. The change
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from coal to oil has reduced the number of stokers to one-tenth. Time
signals broadcast by wireless telegraphy have greatly helped the navigator
since it is no longer necessary to calculate Greenwich mean time in order
to determine the longitude of his ship’s position. Other radio aids to
navigation, particularly radar, which was first applied in 1936 to locate
aircraft in flight, were developed during the second world war and these
have, in effect, linked the ship with the shore for the purposes of control-
ling the direction of its course, while radar itself has reduced the perils
of fog, darkness and icebergs.
Among many developments in communications the two most striking
were the thermionic valve, which effected a fundamental change in
method in wireless telegraphy and which came into general use about
1920, and the multiplex working of cables, by which a number of messages,
often several hundreds, could be sent at the same time, an improvement
dating from about 1930.
Colour cinematography and sound films were introduced in the late
1920s.
The progressive assembly technique in manufacture on conveyor lines
or belts, with which Henry Ford was especially associated in America,
originated in 1913 and later became a characteristic of modem industrial
practice.
The world shortage of animal fats led to greater use of vegetable oils
and fats; and the shortage of soap, arising from the shortage of fats, led
to the production of ‘synthetic’ detergents in a great variety.
And so we might continue, enumerating one technological advance
after another. The important thing for us to observe, however, about this
half-century is that these advances have been made through a far closer
alliance between science and technology than that seen in any previous
age; and it is in this sense that our modem civilisation is properly described
as scientific or technological. While the chance invention has still occasion-
ally played its part in this period, it has been a part that is seen to be ever
decreasing, both in extent and in quality, when contrasted with the con-
scious and deliberate exploitation of new scientific knowledge and its
application to practical ends. That new knowledge has been won and its
application has been effected in this half-century by the labours of one
who has but lately come upon the scene, namely, the professional scientist ;
and to him it is now necessary to refer in greater detail.
The men who founded modem science were amateurs, not professionals ;
they were often churchmen interested in what was called ‘natural philo-
sophy’ or they were men of wealth and social position with a similar
attraction to the study of nature, and their education had in general been
in classics and in mathematics and in theology; and some others had
studied medicine for a profession. The universities did not teach science
in our sense of the term and still less its applications. In the eighteenth
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century there were, however, a few special colleges in France and Ger-
many for training in military and civil engineering and in mining, but the
Ecole Polytechnique, founded in Paris in 1794 during the Revolution, was
the first college concerned with the application of science. Developments
in the nineteenth century were gradual. Germany led the way in multi-
plying technical schools of increasing standard, although it was not until
1899 that these institutions were raised to university status. In Great
Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, there was a similar slow pro-
gress towards technical education, and the teaching of science itself
developed only gradually during the nineteenth century. The slow rise
and growth of the newer university colleges and universities, after the
foundation of University College, London, in 1826 had introduced the
teaching of the different sciences into higher education, indicate lack of
national alertness to the possibilities of applied science among the country-
men of Watt and Faraday. Gradually scientific studies were organised,
even in the older universities. Both in Europe and in the United States
there was scientific as well as technical education and young men, in small
numbers, went into industry after such training. The idea of scientific
research with the object of applying its results was not yet common, and
scientists, outside the scientific departments of the universities, were not
numerous. Further, higher education was regarded as education in the
arts, and education in science, even in a university, was something that
did not rank as high in the intellectual and social scale.
The twentieth century opened, however, with scientific education in
the universities well established in Germany, and with the resounding
recognition of technical education at the usual high standards of the
German universities. In France the situation was much the same, science
and technology having been long allied. Generally there was a deeper
realisation of the necessity of science to industry, as voiced by A. J. (after-
wards Lord) Balfour, who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In
the earlier part of this century, however, there was a much keener realisa-
tion of this necessity in Germany than in any other country; and it was
only as a result of the application of science in certain war industries
during the first world war, coupled with a better understanding of the part
that scientific research had played in the technical advances of German
industry, that steps were taken in other countries for the promotion of
similar advances and for the establishment of official or semi-official
encouragement and financial aid for such technical or industrial research.
In Great Britain the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was
instituted under a committee of the Privy Council while the war was still
in progress: later a number of research associations were formed for
different industries, the government subscribing ‘pound for pound’ with
the different industries to finance these research associations; various
research boards were organised; and the National Physical Laboratory
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was taken over. In the United States, the British reaction to the pre-war
neglect of scientific and industrial research was not only understood and
admired, but also imitated: a National Research Council was set up and
National Research Fellowships were instituted. In France, since the close
connection between science and technology was no new thing, there was less
need for these new departures. In the Soviet Union, after the reorganisa-
tion that followed the revolutionary period, great attention was given to
the setting up and equipping of technical colleges in great numbers. The
general object of these movements in all these countries was the stimulation
of industry to new developments by means of fundamental research and
its application; and emphasis was laid on the connection between science
and industrial efficiency and progress. For a time, however, the increasing
number of young scientists trained in this way was not very considerable,
and it was not realised that a new profession was in process of being
formed, that of the professional scientist or the industrial scientist or the
technologist, as he has been variously called ; and it was only at the end
of our period, during and after the second world war, that the profes-
sional scientist in large numbers found his place in industry and in the
scientific branches of the civil services of the various governments. The
nations had learnt that scientific knowledge and research were vital for
their survival, and this gave the professional scientist an established place
in the state. The state itself was often the only possible source for the heavy
expenditure that scientific research required. Much of this had to be
carried out in university laboratories; the staffs of university scientific
departments had to be greatly increased; many industries had to set up
their own research laboratories, often of a considerable size and with
large technical and scientific staffs; research in pure science or academic
research went on at the same time at an increasing rate, since science itself
must progress in fundamental knowledge, and the advance of science and
technology proved mutually stimulating; and the undergraduate and
post-graduate student in science was no longer merely studying a particu-
lar science or sciences, but preparing himself for the practice of a pro-
fession much as the medical student had always done. At the beginning
of our period, the chances of his doing so were small indeed ; but such had
become the life of the young scientist as the mid-point of the century
approached.
Another development closely followed these changes. At the beginning
of our period a graduate in science with inclinations towards research
might work for two years with his professor or with another either at home
or abroad, and with or without (but much more probably without) one of
the few scholarships or grants then available; and then, if opportunity
offered, he might find a place in some university department where he
would be able to carry on with such research as his duties might give
him time for. But it would normally be individual research, done by
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himself in the spare time left after his teaching and other duties ; and it
would be done at his own cost. Sir William Ramsay, as is well known,
financed his classic researches on the inert gases from the fees that he
earned as a consultant. In the early 1920s, however, the beginner in
scientific research received a grant from one or other of such bodies as
have been mentioned above; and it was given for a specific research under
his professor or supervisor, and that research might or might not consti-
tute a part of the attack on a large problem on which others might be
working in the same laboratory. Later, after these beginnings, the young
scientist might be one of a team working together on a problem, and it
became less and less likely that he would be engaged in individual research.
The organisation of such teams was a marked feature of much scientific
research in the later part of our period. In Great Britain, for example,
much of this kind of academic research was financed by the Department
of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Medical Research Council, the
various research associations, and individual industrial companies. Often
the problem was precisely stated and the research organised as needing
a staff of so many and as likely to take so long, but more often these details
were not calculable. The speed and the urgency of much scientific research
changed greatly in the times we are discussing ; and the services of a variety
of scientists trained in different sciences were often needed in collabora-
tion on one problem. Such were the organisation and practice of science
at the mid-point of the twentieth century.
Of the organisation of these great numbers of scientists throughout the
world into their specialist societies in every country, it is scarcely neces-
sary to mention any detail except that these scientific societies provided
in their journals, m a intained by the subscriptions of their members, the
media for the publication of the bulk of the world’s scientific research. In
conjunction they organised also a service that compiled for publication
classified abstracts of the latest memoirs in the journals dealing with each
particular science. By this means the researcher was enabled to keep in
touch with the latest advances in his own field and in any other in which
he might be interested. Societies multiplied with the increasing complexity
of science in this half-century, and their publications greatly increased.
The World List of Scientific Periodicals gives valuable information on this
point. The first edition of this useful work covered the period from 1900
to 1921 and included all journals published up to 1900 or brought out
between that year and 1921, except those that might have escaped its net:
the total was about 25,000. The second edition brought these details up to
1933: the number had increased to 36,000. The third edition brought
them up to 1950: the number exceeded 50,000. As for the scientific books
published and translated from one language into another, it would be
difficult to form any estimate of the increase in their publication.
It will be noticed that between 1921 and 1950 the number of scientific
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periodicals doubled. Scientific periodical literature originated in the
middle of the seventeenth century with the publication of the proceedings
of the first national scientific academies; the number of such journals
steadily increased. The data from the World List indicate that the total
had reached 25,000 by 1921 ; much of this increase, it is known, occurred
in the nineteenth century. It will be noted, however, that the number of
scientific journals rose from 1921 to 1933 by 11,000 in twelve years, and
then by a further 14,000 from 1933 to 1950 in seventeen years, from
which six years of war should be deducted. This is characteristic of the
whole period; and, looking a little farther back, to a century ago, we may
say that, when the advances of the last hundred years are studied closely,
it is found that by far the greater part lie in this half-century, and, similarly,
when the progress of this half-century is analysed, it is evident that the
greater part of it fell within the second quarter. The pace has steadily
increased through these hundred years.
The historian of science surveying these fifty years, if he can detach
himself from contemporary disputation and argument about the ethics
of the application of scientific discovery to the waging of war, about
remedies against the narrowness of scientific education, about the perils
of technocracy, and about the urgent need for more and more scientists,
looks upon a period of unparalleled and ever accelerated progress in
science and technology. By far the greater part of it fell within the second
quarter of the century, and much of it was expedited by the needs of two
world wars and of the so-called ‘cold war’ as well. He will reflect sorrow-
fully that science, which began as the study of nature for its own sake,
became in this age vital to the survival of nations in arms, and that in its
disinterested pursuit of truth it was forced for the same cause to halt at
frontiers where hitherto it had recognised none.
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CHAPTER V
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY 1900-1912
B y 1900 the two dynamic forces of nationalism and industrialism had
radically altered the balance of power throughout the world. Accom-
panied by increasing state control, they had extended European
sovereignty to nearly the whole of Africa, led to new rivalries in Asia,
and contributed to the spectacular development in wealth and strength
of two non-European states, the U.S.A. and Japan. A further result was
that the great powers in Europe were becoming greater, the small powers
relatively weaker. Although the principal ‘ great powers ’ were still Euro-
pean, their relations with the peoples of other continents were of growing
importance and the issues that divided them often concerned regions far
beyond the confines of Europe. As the means of communication had
multiplied in number and celerity, so the area and sensitivity of political
repercussion had strikingly increased. By 1900 international relations
were world relations in a sense unknown in 1 800 or at the dawn of any
previous century.
During the 1890s these relations underwent notable modifications.
Bismarck had kept the peace of Europe, excluding the Balkan peninsula,
for the best part of twenty years and the pattern of European relations had
appeared relatively stable. But his fall in 1890, the uncertain temper of the
brilliant, impulsive and indiscreet young emperor, William II, who dis-
missed him, and the uncertain policy of the lesser men who succeeded him
and who, partly out of consideration for England, failed to renew the
Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, but did renew the Triple Alliance
(6 May 1891), inaugurated a period of fundamental change. Alarmed by
the renewal of the Triple Alliance and by Anglo-German friendliness,
Russia, whose relations with Germany had been cool even while the
Reinsurance Treaty was in force, began to look elsewhere. The natural ally,
dictated by strategical and economic, though not by ideological, con-
siderations, was Republican France, whose statesmen were eager for
Russian friendship, and the Franco-Russian Alliance (an exchange of
letters agreeing to joint action for the maintenance of peace dated
27 August 1891 and a secret military convention of 18 August 1892
ratified by the two governments in the winter of 1893-4) brought about
just that conjunction which Bismarck had striven to prevent. Although
these agreements were wholly defensive and contained no ‘ suggestion of
mutual support for the realisation of any positive ambitions’, they gave
France a feeling of security unknown to her since 1871 and caused mis-
givings in England as well as in Germany, since it was with France and
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Russia that British interests chiefly conflicted. The balance of power was
likely once again to become a European issue. This was a new factor in
international relations and one which remained fundamental until the
outbreak of the first world war. As yet, however, not all the eventual
partners had taken sides, and the permanence of the new grouping had
still to be tested. Although there were now two alliance systems, the
nineties were characterised by such a complex fluidity of policies that
they have been called the period of the ‘ interpenetration of alliances \ l
Outside Europe there were also changes of fundamental importance.
The extension of European dominion continued apace and brought fresh
menaces of conflict, while a new phase of expansion began for the non-
European states, the U.S.A. and Japan.
In the Far East the ancient empire of China was the chief bone of
contention. There, first in the field, England had by 1890 established a
commercial and diplomatic pre-eminence based upon sea power. In the
north, Russia aimed at securing an ice-free port to serve as the terminus
of the great Trans-Siberian Railway, which she had begun to build in 1891
with the aid of French capital, and which was to transform the strategic
position in North-East Asia. In the south, France’s acquisition of Indo-
china had been indirectly at Chinese expense, as had the British annexa-
tion of Upper Burma in 1885, and both powers were now able to penetrate
into south China. Foreign concessions and commercial establishments
in Shanghai and other great Chinese cities were eloquent witness to the
economic stakes at issue. Indisputably China was the ‘sick man’ of the
Far East, but, as in the Near East with Turkey, the European powers
disagreed upon his treatment. Thus, whereas Russia favoured the amputa-
tion of outlying areas and opposed the open door for commerce, Britain
championed integrity and the policy of free trade which had brought her
two-thirds of China’s modest foreign trade.
It was, however, the intervention of Japan in 1894 which made the
Far Eastern question a major factor in international relations. Japan,
who had so recently emerged from feudal isolation and astounded the
world by her ability to assimilate western ideas and techniques, was in
dispute with China over the Ryukyu Islands and Korea and determined to
prevent their falling under European, especially Russian, control. After
a brief and successful war, by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895)
she obliged China to cede the island of Formosa and on the mainland
the Liaotung Peninsula with its valuable ice-free harbour, Port Arthur,
to grant her most-favoured-nation status in China, and to recognise the
independence of Korea. This outcome was extremely unwelcome both
to Russia, whose rulers were beginning to envisage the seizure of Man-
churia and the eventual reduction of China to the position of a client
1 For example, by G. Salvemini and W. L. Langer. See the latter’s The Diplomacy of
Imperialism, 1890-1902 (New York and London, 1935), vol. 1, p. 297.
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state, and to Germany, who, with Russia’s reluctant acquiescence, was
planning herself to seize a Chinese port; and these two powers together
with France, who felt bound to support Russia, demanded that Japan
should hand back the Liaotung Peninsula. Japan complied, accepting an
indemnity instead, but harboured a deep resentment against Russia and
Germany, against whom she would one day take her revenge. Thus Far
Eastern affairs had led to a loose coalition in Asia of those European
powers who were on opposite sides in Europe. In effect their co-operation,
which continued intermittently for another ten years, was a local mani-
festation of the sort of continental alliance against England so often
urged by anti-British statesmen in Europe. China’s self-appointed cham-
pions did not go unrequited. Russia soon received her reward, notably
in a concession for the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway,
which facilitated her penetration into Manchuria, while France obtained
railway concessions in the Yunnan area. Two years later the spoliation of
China went a stage farther when Germany seized a base in Kiao-Chow
Bay on 14 November 1897, and when, in March 1898, Russia, having
declined English overtures for a ‘partition of preponderance’, 1 occupied
the coveted Port Arthur, which she converted into a naval base. In both
instances the European powers gained economic advantages in the ad-
jacent territories and preferred to extort leasehold concessions instead of
proclaiming outright annexation. This was a convenient new device
‘ whereby Foreign Powers might acquire the substance of colonial authority
without a complete transfer of title’. 2 Inevitably the other powers felt
obliged to seek some semblance of compensation, and accordingly
England occupied Wei-hai-wei and France Kwang Chow Wan. The open-
door policy had largely broken down, in spite of British and, subsequently
(1899), American gestures to maintain it, and the struggle for ‘spheres of
influence ’ in China became the dominant concern.
These events had significant consequences. Chinese nationalist resent-
ment manifested itself in the Boxer risings of 1900 in which the foreign
Legations in Peking were besieged and many ‘foreign devils’, including
the German Minister, met their death. At the same time Japan’s feeling
against Russia was embittered by the seizure of Port Arthur and she began
to contemplate the possibility of war to prevent further Russian expan-
sion. Her suspicions and those of England, throughout opposed to
Russia’s Chinese policy, were intensified when the Boxer risings enabled
Russian troops to enter Manchuria in force. Thus, although the principal
European powers and Japan combined to send an international force
against the Boxers and to exact an indemnity from the Chinese govem-
1 Lord Salisbury to Sir N. O’Conor, 25 January 1898. G. P. Gooch and H. W. V.
Temperley (eds.), British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. 1 (London,
1927), no. 9. The ‘preponderance’ envisaged by Salisbury was economic, not territorial.
s G. F. Hudson, The Far East in World Politics: A Study in Recent History (2nd ed.,
1939). P- 100.
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ment, the Chinese question at the beginning of the twentieth century
threatened to multiply the occasions of friction between the white nations.
In particular, it had added a vast new area to the wide field in which
British and Russian interests already conflicted.
In the Near East, however, Russia’s preoccupation with Chinese ques-
tions resulted in an interlude in her traditional Balkan rivalry with Austria,
and this happier state of affairs was confirmed by an agreement of May
1897, whereby the two powers renounced any conquests for themselves
should the status quo in the Balkans be disturbed, and by the Muerzsteg
Programme of 1903 in which they combined in efforts to settle the affairs
of Macedonia. But this temporary improvement in Austro-Russian rela-
tions did not mean that Turkish affairs had ceased to be vexatious or
significant. That shaky power had been shaken again by fresh stirrings of
her subject nationalities, by risings in Armenia (1894), Crete (May 1896),
and Macedonia. In 1895 England had threatened a naval demonstration
to induce her to desist from solving the Armenian question by massacring
the Armenians, and only the menace of Russian counter-measures had
prevented the threat from being implemented. In Crete revolt had excited
Greece to launch a hopeless attack upon Turkey, with the result that the
Great Powers had intervened in order to prevent the conflict from spread-
ing to the Balkans and had obliged the Turks to grant the Cretans auto-
nomy under a Greek High Commissioner.
That Turkey had weathered these storms was, as so often before,
largely due to the conflicting interests of the Great Powers. Traditionally,
England had been the principal champion of Turkish integrity. But British
influence at Constantinople had declined since 1879, and, as Salisbury
despaired of Turkish reform and his colleagues, since the conclusion of the
Franco-Russian alliance, were reluctant to risk the fleet for the protection
of the Straits, control of the Nile valley had superseded the maintenance of
Turkey as the chief British objective at the eastern end of the Mediter-
ranean. The role of Turkey’s champion had been assumed instead by
Germany. Already in 188 1 a German military mission had undertaken the
training of the Turkish army and in 1888 a German syndicate had ob-
tained a concession to build a railway from Ismid to Ankara. In 1889 the
German emperor had paid a first visit to Constantinople and in 1898 at
Damascus he demonstratively proclaimed his friendship for the Muslim
world. The 1888 concession marked the beginning of a rapid extension of
German economic influence. Naturally the German government favoured
these developments, which received powerful backing from the able
ambassador sent to Constantinople in 1897, Baron Marschall von Bieber-
stein. Within a few years he had acquired a dominant situation in the
Turkish capital, while the efficiency of German ‘promoters, bankers,
traders, engineers, manufacturers, ship-owners and railway builders n soon
1 E. M. Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers and the Baghdad Railway (London, 1923 ), p. 37 .
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undermined French and British interests and created something like a
German economic empire in the Near East. Most significant of all were
the grant obtained by the German-controlled Anatolian Railway Company
in 1899 to build a commercial port at Haidar Pasha on the Asiatic side of
the Bosporus and the concession in principle of an extension of their
railway from Konieh to Baghdad and the Persian Gulf.
To Turkey herself these developments seemed eminently desirable:
railways would bring prosperity to backward districts of the empire and
enable the government to move troops more rapidly to defend the fron-
tiers or deal with internal disturbances, while the economic and diplomatic
support of distant and seemingly disinterested Germany appeared the best
guarantee of Turkish integrity. But so far as international relations were
concerned this economic penetration could not but have a political signifi-
cance. What alarmed other nations was the new projection of German
power diagonally overland in an axis from Berlin to Constantinople
which threatened to divide Europe in two. Such an axis cut across Russia’s
possible line of expansion to the Mediterranean through the Balkans,
while the revival of Turkish power under German influence promised to
frustrate Russia’s age-long aspiration to control the Straits. Furthermore,
the prolongation of the axis through Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf
could be seen as a menace to British interests in Egypt and Persia. Thus,
although the Deutsche Bank sought to enlist the aid of British, French
and Russian capital to finance the construction of the Baghdad Railway,
it was impossible for governments to regard this as a purely business
undertaking. Russia had shown her alarm at the concession of Haidar
Pasha; by the Black Sea Agreement of 1900 she forced the Turks to admit
that any railway concessions in northern Anatolia and Armenia should
be granted only to Russian citizens or to syndicates approved by the tsar;
and she eventually withdrew her consent to the participation of Russian
capital in the development of the Baghdad Railway. The British govern-
ment on the other hand had been in favour of giving the railway an
international character, but public opinion in England, already highly
distrustful of Germany, made such an outcry against the participation
of a British financial syndicate that they withdrew their support. This was
a notable instance of the way in which diplomacy had sometimes to
retreat in face of the new forces of publicity. The French government,
impelled to follow Russia, likewise refused official backing, so that the
Germans began the construction of the first section of the railway in 1904
without the financial aid of foreign governments. The intrusion of Ger-
many into spheres long earmarked by other powers for themselves had
introduced a new disturbing factor into international relations. In par-
ticular it imposed a new strain on the relations of Germany with Russia,
France and England.
The third great area in which the European powers pursued their
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partitioning projects was Africa. Here the scene was dominated by the
traditional colonial rivalry of France and England, the determination of
Germany to make her influence felt, and the failure of the Italian attempt
to conquer a new dominion.
English and French interests collided at many points but, whereas
frontier disputes in the west were settled by an Anglo-French Convention
of 14 June 1898, differences farther east were less easily composed. The
main tension came with the struggle for control of the Upper Nile. For
England, virtual mistress of Egypt since 1882, this was of vital concern,
since the prosperity of Egypt depended upon the Nile waters. An attempt
in 1894-5 to agree with France upon a definition of spheres of influence
came to nothing. The French had never ceased to resent the fact that,
largely through French timidity, the British had gained sole control of
Egypt. Furthermore, some French colonial expansionists hoped to secure
a continuous block of territory from the Atlantic to the Red Sea or Indian
Ocean. For such a plan, as well as for applying pressure to Britain in
Egypt, the Upper Nile region was of great importance, and in 1896 an
expedition was sent to plant the French flag at Fashoda. In the same year
Kitchener had been dispatched by the British government to reconquer
the Egyptian Sudan, which had been evacuated in 1884, and in 1898 he
captured Khartoum. On 25 September 1898, when he found Marchand’s
French troops at Fashoda and summoned them to withdraw, there
occurred one of the gravest crises in Anglo-French relations since 1815.
The British government mobilised the English press in support of its stand.
Fleet Street being taken quite unusually into the direct confidence of the
Foreign Office, and refused to negotiate until Marchand’s force had been
ordered to retire. For the second time in the ’nineties (there had been
acute tension over Siam in 1893) England and France were on the brink
of war. But the new French Foreign Minister, Delcasse, and his col-
leagues wisely recognised that France was in no condition to undertake
a colonial war against the greatest naval power, and on 3 November
they ordered the evacuation of the disputed territory. An Anglo-French
Convention of 21 March 1899 demarcated the British and French spheres
of interest in the region of the watershed between the Nile and the Congo
and the problem of control of the Upper Nile was solved in favour of
Britain.
The Fashoda crisis convinced an important group of French colonial-
ists that France could no longer effectively challenge English rule in
Egypt. Instead they urged Delcasse to offer England French recognition
of her position in Egypt if she in turn would recognise French ambitions
in Morocco. 1 This was the bargain which a few years later was to be the
basis of the Entente Cordiale, but, in the aftermath of the Fashoda crisis,
1 I am indebted for this and other points to Dr C. M. Andrew’s forthcoming study of
Delcasse.
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Delcasse was still unwilling to abandon what remained of French rights
in Egypt. Egypt excepted, however, he genuinely desired a swift and
amicable settlement of the other points at issue between France and
England, and early in 1899 Paul Cambon, the new French ambassador in
London, made several attempts to reach an understanding with Salisbury.
His efforts were, however, unsuccessful and in August 1899 Delcasse told
the British ambassador that events had seemed to show ‘ the impossibility
of keeping relations with England on a friendly footing’. 1 Delcasse was
soon to see in English involvement in South Africa a fresh opportunity to
challenge English rule in Egypt.
In South Africa the main conflicting interests were those of England
and Germany, who had established herself in South West Africa in 1884;
and the main cause of trouble was the economic development of the Boer
Republic of the Transvaal. The gold rush of the ’eighties had led to the
unwelcome influx into the Boer states of a large new white population
which soon equalled and possibly outnumbered the original Boer stock.
To these Uitlanders or foreigners the restrictive policies of the Boer
President of the Transvaal became so irksome that revolt was openly
plotted with the connivance of certain people in the adjoining British
territories. But the Jameson raid of 1895, which attempted to precipitate
such a rising, was a fiasco. Its most dramatic outcome was the interven-
tion of the German emperor, whose congratulatory telegram to President
Kruger on 3 January 1896 roused passionate resentment in England.
Furthermore, the belief it encouraged in Kruger that he might rely on
foreign support strengthened him in the intransigent attitude which led
finally to the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1 899.
Although Germany was helpless to intervene directly in South Africa,
Britain’s difficulties there and Portugal’s financial troubles gave her an
opportunity to exact a price for refraining from further encouragement
to the Boers. This took the form of the Convention of 30 August 1898 in
which the two powers defined their spheres of interest and the areas which
they would occupy in the event of Portugal abandoning her colonies.
But the good effect upon Germany of this dubious arrangement was un-
done by the colonial guarantee reaffirmed by England to Portugal in the
following year in return for a Portuguese undertaking to stop the passage
of arms to the Transvaal. The Germans felt that they had been tricked and
the memory of this English ‘perfidy’ was undoubtedly a stumbling-block
in the way of future Anglo-German arrangements. ‘With these people’,
exclaimed the powerful director of the German Foreign Office, Baron von
Holstein, ‘it is impossible to enter into any engagement.’ 2 Despite their
mistrust, however, Germany during the Boer War refrained from taking
1 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. 1, p. 212.
2 Quoted in H. Nicolson, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart, First Lord Carnock: A Study in
the Old Diplomacy (London, 1930), p. 128.
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY I900-I9I2
advantage of British isolation which others also wished to exploit. Thus,
for example, Delcasse had at first hoped that Germany would join the
Dual Alliance in a diplomatic initiative aimed at obliging England to
honour her pledges to evacuate Egypt once order had been restored there.
In March 1900, however, Germany declared that before considering inter-
vention she must be assured of France’s recognition of existing European
boundaries. This would have involved French acceptance of Alsace-
Lorraine as a permanent part of Germany, a requirement which Delcasse
regarded as intolerable. Henceforth, believing that this was Germany’s
condition for Franco-German co-operation, he consistently rejected any
idea of a rapprochement with Germany. Thus, just as events in South
Africa had sown seeds of distrust between Britain and Germany which
would not easily be eradicated, so the Boer War was a turning-point in
Franco-German relations.
Colonial questions in Africa had thus led to grave friction between
certain European powers; but they had generally been subordinated to
European interests, and they had not materially hindered the process of
bringing ever-larger areas of the African continent under more effective
European control. Another European power, Italy, however, was less
successful in her attempts at expansion, and her defeat at Adowa in 1 896
by the Ethiopians, whom she had hoped to reduce to vassalage, dealt a
blow to white prestige, changed the direction of her imperialist ambitions
and had important repercussions upon Italian policy in Europe.
Meanwhile the ’nineties were no less significant for the new advances
made by the U.S.A. There, nationalism of an expansionist character was
once again in the ascendant. Its belligerent tone, manifested by President
Cleveland in the British-Venezuelan boundary dispute of 1895, gave a
new extension to the Monroe Doctrine and obliged an England pre-
occupied by South African affairs to have recourse to arbitration. Still
more important was the American war with Spain (April-August 1898),
which led not only to the establishment of a United States protectorate
over Cuba and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and Puerto Rico,
but also to American assumption of direct rule over Guam and the Philip-
pines. The annexation of the Philippines, the abrupt climax of long years
of penetration into the Pacific area, was a striking departure from the
traditional policy of confining American political responsibilities to the
western hemisphere. Although it did not of itself involve the U.S.A. in Far
Eastern rivalries, it meant that in the long run, territorially and strategically
as well as commercially, she was much more likely to become so involved.
However reluctantly and hesitantly, the Americans were beginning to
assume the cares and ambitions of a world power to which their wealth and
population already committed them.
Although these extra-European developments did not seriously affect
the systems of alliance within Europe, they showed up the weak links in
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those systems, and the tension and danger of war created by such incidents
as the Kruger Telegram and Fashoda gave rise to a sense of insecurity
which impelled the major powers to seek to reinforce their positions.
This reinforcement, which led to the completion of the alliance system,
is a main theme of the next decade.
The sense of insecurity was increased by the growth of defensive arma-
ments. The military budget of the German empire had nearly trebled since
1878 and those of England and France more than or nearly doubled.
One way of relieving tension would have been by an agreed reduction of
armaments and this was actually proposed by the tsar in 1898. The
Russian note of 24 August suggesting an international conference urged
that if armaments continued to grow there would be ‘a cataclysm too
horrible for the human mind to contemplate’. But the tsar’s gesture,
coming as it did shortly after Russia’s seizure of Port Arthur, was met
with incredulity and suspicion. Germany above all had ‘no intention of
binding herself in the question of military armaments’, 1 and the only
positive results of the first Hague Peace Conference (May-July 1899)
were the establishment of a permanent court of arbitration and the adop-
tion of two conventions relating to the rules of war. In the long run the
Hague tribunal was to prove an enduring and important piece of machin-
ery for the adjustment of international relations; but immediately the
discouraging effect of the conference was to make clear that the arma-
ments race would continue. Soon this would be a danger at sea as well
as on land.
While the Hague Conference was still sitting, France on the initiative of
Delcasse, who was preoccupied by the danger of the disintegration of
Austria-Hungary after the death of Francis Joseph, renewed and ex-
tended her ties with Russia. On 9 August 1899 an exchange of letters
took place in which ‘the maintenance of the balance of power’ was sub-
stituted for ‘the maintenance of peace’ as the prime object of the Franco-
Russian alliance. This redefinition (later widely interpreted as implying
that France would be readier to support Russia’s Balkan ambitions) was
intended by Delcasse as a statement of Franco-Russian opposition to
Germany’s supposed ambition to take Trieste, if Austria-Hungary broke
up, and establish herself in the Mediterranean. At the same time the
military convention, hitherto to last as long only as the Triple Alliance,
was prolonged indefinitely, thereby ensuring that the Dual Alliance would
survive any dissolution of Austria-Hungary. In 1900 the military arrange-
ments between the two powers were also adapted to cover the risk of war
with England, and an agreement to this end was ratified in 1901. In the
1 ‘Dass wir nicht gesonnen sind, uns in der Frage der militarischen Rustungen nach
irgendeiner Richtung hin zu binden, brauche ich hier kaum zu erwahnen’, Biilow’s instruc-
tions to Munster, the chief German delegate to the conference (Die Grosse Politik der
Europdischen Kabinette 1871-1914, vol. xv, Berlin, 1927, p. 190). Cf. G. P. Gooch, Before
the War; Studies in Diplomacy, vol. I (London, 1936), p. 196.
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY I900-I9I2
dawn of the new century both powers could consider war with England a
danger which they must take into account. This did not mean that
Delcasse had abandoned the objective of an understanding with England,
but indicates that he still doubted its possibility.
At the same time a rapprochement between France and Italy ended a
period of tension dating from the French occupation of Tunis in 1881.
France naturally welcomed any opportunity to make the third partner
in the Triple Alliance sit more loosely to her obligations, while Italy,
baulked of Ethiopia, cast all the more longing eyes across the Mediter-
ranean on the undeveloped Ottoman dependency of Tripoli. For any
attempt on Tripoli to succeed, the goodwill of France, who held the
adjoining Tunisia, was essential. New men, in Italy the Prime Minister,
Rudini, and the Foreign Ministers, Visconti Venosta and Prinetti, in
France Delcasse and Camille Barrere, sent to the Rome Embassy in 1898,
helped to bring about the change. In 1898 a commercial treaty ended the
customs war begun in 1888 which had damaged Italy more than France.
On 14 December 1900 a secret agreement followed, whereby France
promised Italy a free hand in Tripoli in return for recognition of France’s
interests in Morocco. The final triumph of French policy came in 1902
when Italy, who had just renewed the Triple Alliance for the fourth time
and in doing so extorted an Austrian recognition of her interests in
Tripoli, gave France a secret assurance that if France were attacked or
obliged to declare war as a result of ‘direct provocation’ she would
remain neutral. Her Mediterranean ambitions and skilful French diplo-
macy had thus led Italy to give an undertaking which was certainly not in
accordance with the spirit of her obligations under the Triple Alliance
which she had just renewed. Although the text was kept secret until 1920,
a statement by Delcasse in the French Chamber claimed that France now
had nothing to fear from Italy. In fact, however, the undertaking was
equivocal. Despite the undoubted improvement in Franco-Italian rela-
tions manifested in 1901 by the visit of an Italian naval squadron to
Toulon and subsequently by an exchange of visits between the heads of the
two states, Italy, the weakest of the great powers, sat on the fence. Thus,
while Germany was naturally irritated by what in the Reichstag her
Chancellor affected to regard as an innocent flirtation, it was not until
later that the flirtation was, as a French historian remarked, ‘to develop
into a liaison’. 1
It was natural for France to seek to extend the circle of her friends. For
her, isolation had been the penalty of defeat. For England it was less
splendid or complete than used to be supposed. Yet England’s abandon-
ment of her relative aloofness and freedom from commitments because of
a new sense of the need for security was a pregnant development. This
1 M. Baumont, L'Essor Industrie! et I’imperialisme colonial (1878-1904) (Paris, 1 937),
P-323-
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sense of insecurity was the product chiefly of the Boer War and of fear of
Russia, who until the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 appeared to most
British statesmen and a considerable section of British public opinion to
be a great and growing menace to British imperial interests.
At first England’s most natural ally had seemed to be Germany. But
early negotiations had come to nothing and, after the conclusion of the
Franco-Russian alliance, which appeared to weaken England’s inter-
national position, the German rulers inclined to believe that England
would soon come cap in hand and enable them to extract a high price
for their friendship. Although at times they indulged in frankly hostile
dreams of a continental alliance for the destruction of the British Empire,
their general policy was to keep a free hand as between Russia and England
but to show that the hand was mailed and held a sharp sword. Thereby
the kaiser was encouraged by his Chancellor, Bulow, to believe that he
could play the role of arbiter mundi. So Germany entered upon a
disconcerting course in which, in order to break the Franco-Russian
alliance and to bring England to heel, she aggressively demonstrated her
growing strength.
The first conspicuous example of this policy, the Kruger Telegram,
was the first incident which made England feel that it would be wise to
settle some of her differences and win a friend in Europe; but it was to
Russia, not to Germany, that she turned, and a proposal by Salisbury
for the mutual recognition of spheres of interest in Turkey was suggested
as part of a wider settlement. This was the first of several such overtures,
but, until her defeat by Japan, Russia saw in agreement with England
a hindrance not an aid to her expansionist policy and she therefore turned
a deaf ear.
It was above all the Far Eastern question which convinced an important
section of British opinion, headed by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph
Chamberlain, that the time had come to abandon isolation. Failing the
U.S.A., and Japan, who was not yet disposed for an alliance that might
provoke an armed clash with Russia for which she was still unprepared,
Chamberlain turned to Germany. In 1898, in Salisbury’s absence, he
suggested a defensive alliance based upon ‘a mutual understanding as to
policy in China and elsewhere’. But China was not a vital German interest
and Germany had no wish to side against Russia or to pull England’s
chestnuts out of the Far Eastern fire for her. By keeping a free hand she
hoped rather to profit from the conflict between England and Russia
which seemed so probable. The negotiations petered out and Chamberlain’s
subsequent public affirmation of England’s need for an alliance with some
‘great military power’ aroused no enthusiasm in Germany or England.
Indeed, an important factor in Anglo-German relations before 1914 was
the lukewarmness or antagonism of British popular feelings towards
Germany and the positive and increasing hostility of the great mass of
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY I900-I9I2
German opinion towards Britain. This mutual antipathy, which dates
mainly from the Boer War, was all the more widespread since the develop-
ment of a cheap popular press in both countries in the ’nineties, for neither
country properly understood the workings of the press in the other and
neither government was fully able to restrain the hostile outpourings of its
own newspapers. In such circumstances a genuine alliance would have
been very difficult to accomplish.
In spite of his failure, Chamberlain was loth to relinquish his dream
of partnership between the big army and the big navy, so alien to the
main tradition of British foreign policy, and, when the kaiser visited England
in November 1899, he reverted to the theme of an alliance, this time be-
tween England, Germany and the U.S.A. But when in a public speech
at Leicester he referred to ‘ the natural alliance between ourselves and the
great German empire’ he met with strikingly little support in England,
criticism in the U.S.A. and a storm of hostile comment in Germany.
Moreover, in the Reichstag Biilow poured cold water on Chamberlain’s
overtures and spoke of the need for a strong German fleet. The second
German Navy Bill, introduced in January 1900, with its principle that
‘Germany must have a battle fleet so strong that even the adversary pos-
sessed of the greatest sea power will attack it only with grave risk to
herself’, continued the potentially challenging policy inaugurated by
Admiral von Tirpitz, who had become Minister of Marine in 1897.
England was rebuffed and when, by the Yangtze Agreement of 16 October
1900, ‘the only formal agreement for diplomatic co-operation ever made
between Great Britain and Germany’, 1 the two powers undertook to
maintain Chinese integrity and the open door for trade ‘wherever both
Powers can exert influence ’, they soon fell out because they differed sharply
over its interpretation.
The last attempt to bring about an alliance occurred in 1901. Originating
probably with a personal initiative of Eckardstein, First Secretary of the
German Embassy in London, and favoured again by Chamberlain and
his friends, it developed on the German side into a proposal that England
should join the Triple Alliance. But Salisbury saw no advantage — ‘the
liability of having to defend the German and Austrian frontiers against
Russia is heavier than that of having to defend the British Isles against
France’ 2 — and, as the Germans would be content with nothing less and
were no longer interested in local co-operation, such as an alliance in the
Far East mooted by Lansdowne, the new Foreign Secretary, these
negotiations too were fruitless. If the Germans genuinely wished for
Britain’s friendship their insistence on her adherence to the Triple
Alliance showed a lack of psychological insight, for, as the Anglo-French
1 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (Oxford, 1954 ), p. 393-
* British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. m, no. 86. Salisbury uses
the words ‘British Isles’, although ‘British Empire’ would have been more appropriate.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
entente was to show, a close association with Britain could operate without
any formal ties. Btilow and his colleagues still believed that they had only
to wait for England to renew her suit and pay the price. In spite of a plain
hint by Chamberlain in April 1898, they could not think it possible that
she would turn elsewhere. Their miscalculation was grievous.
Fresh tension in the Far East was part of the background to these
negotiations. On the one hand, an alleged Chinese agreement to recognise
Russia’s hold on Manchuria alarmed Japan and led her to sound England
for support against Russia. On the other, Russia’s encroachments in
Manchuria and Persia had made England still more conscious of her
isolation. But it was not until he had failed both to enlist German aid in
restraining Russia and to come to terms directly with Russia that Lans-
downe contemplated alliance with Japan alone. At the same time Japanese
statesmen were divided between the merits of an English alliance (desired
by the war party) and a settlement with Russia. Thus, while the Japanese
Ambassador, Baron Hayashi, was negotiating in London, Prince Ito was
empowered to visit St Petersburg to explore the chances of an agreement
with Russia. In view of their past experience the Japanese were by no
means sure that either aim could be achieved. But, after the failure of
renewed overtures to Russia, Lansdowne was convinced of the need for
Japan’s support, and so the Japanese had already committed themselves
in principle to the English alliance when Ito reported that a Russo-
Japanese agreement was also within the bounds of possibility. They could
not have both and were reluctant to alienate England, who had abstained
from interfering with their victory at Shimonoseki and had been the first to
renounce extra-territoriality in Japan, by withdrawing when negotiations
were so advanced. Thus on 30 January 1902 there was signed the treaty
which marked England’s abandonment of isolation in the Far East and
strikingly emphasised the status Japan had won for herself among the
nations (see below, ch. xn).
By the terms of the treaty, which was to last for five years, Japan
appeared to gain more than England. By the first article each power
recognised the other’s special interests in China, but England also recog-
nised those of Japan in Korea, whereas the Japanese had refused to extend
their obligations to cover India, Siam and the Straits Settlements. By the
second, if either power was involved in hostilities with another in defence
of those interests the other was to preserve strict neutrality. By the third,
if one of the signatories was at war with two powers in defence of those
interests the other must come to its aid. In other words, England would
be neutral if there was war between Russia and Japan, but would be
bound to help Japan if France joined Russia. The treaty made war be-
tween Russia and Japan more likely, though this was not Lansdowne’s
intention, but it also made French participation more remote; for if
‘France would not fight for the valley of the Nile, it was highly im-
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY I 900 -I 9 I 2
probable that she would draw the sword for Korea’. 1 For England the
important thing ‘ was not what was in the Alliance, but the fact that there
was an Alliance’; 2 had Russia and Japan agreed upon a common policy,
British interests in the Far East generally might have been gravely menaced.
By relieving the pressure on her in the Far East the Anglo-Japanese
alliance enabled England to reinforce her fleets in home waters. This new
course of policy, in which Lansdowne sought ‘to strengthen Britain’s
global interests by concentrating her military resources ’, 3 had its counter-
part in the western hemisphere. The Hay-Pauncefote treaty of 1 8 November
1901 enabled the U.S.A. to proceed with the construction and defence of a
trans-isthmian canal, but in effect marked England’s surrender of her
naval supremacy in the Caribbean. Yet it led to a notable improvement in
Anglo-American relations.
Although the Anglo-Japanese alliance made war between Russia and
Japan more likely, it did not render it inevitable or preclude further at-
tempts by Japan to settle her differences by negotiation. The deciding
factor which led to conflict was the seizure of control over Russia’s Far
Eastern policy by an irresponsible militarist group.
In a military autocracy like Russia, when the autocrat was a man of
weak will, as was Nicholas II, policy might oscillate violently because of
the struggle of different interests to influence the tsar. The able finance
minister, Witte, and most of his colleagues favoured a policy of peaceful
penetration in China, but Witte’s fall in August 1903 and the appointment
of Admiral Alexeiev as viceroy in the Far East responsible directly to
the tsar marked the ascendancy of a sinister camarilla, headed by an
adventurer named Bezobrazoff, who envisaged war to gain their ends. In
consequence Russia failed to carry out her undertaking of April 1902
to evacuate Manchuria, and after several months of negotiation in 1903
Japanese requirements for a peaceful settlement remained unsatisfied.
At last, convinced of Russian bad faith, the Japanese determined upon
the event for which they had long prepared. If there was to be war it
should come at the moment of their choosing, when their naval arma-
ments had been completed and before the Trans-Siberian Railway was
finished. On 8 February 1904, without declaration of war, they opened
hostilities by an attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The Russians
were taken by surprise, lost command of the sea, and quickly suffered
a series of reverses. Port Arthur fell on 2 January 1905, after a seven
months’ siege; Mukden was captured in March 1905; and the Russian
Baltic fleet, which had sailed half way round the world in an endeavour
to regain mastery of theChinaSea, was annihilated on27 May at Tsushima.
1 G. P. Gooch, Before the War, vol. 1, p. 22.
1 W. L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902, vol. n (New York and
London, 1935), p. 783.
* J. A. S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy (London, 1964), p. 389.
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Contrary to the expectation of most European military experts, Japan had
defeated the Russian giant unaided, and once again, as in the Crimean
War, but still more dramatically, the tsardom was shown to be a colossus
with feet of clay. Grave disturbances broke out in various parts of
European Russia and, no longer in any condition to fight, the tsar’s
government gladly accepted the American President Roosevelt’s offer of
mediation. By the ensuing Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905,
signed a month after the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance with
widened scope for a further period of five years, they ceded Port Arthur
and the southern half of the island of Sakhalin together with the southern
half of the railway they had built in Manchuria. They also recognised
Japanese supremacy over Korea, which Japan formally annexed in 1910.
In spite of the disappointment of her public opinion, Japan could afford
to waive her claim to any indemnity beyond the cost of maintenance of
prisoners of war: she had attained her objectives and her moderation
paved the way for an improvement in her relations with Russia and an
eventual second agreement (1907) for the division of Manchuria into
Russian and Japanese spheres of influence. It was the first time that an
Asiatic power had proved more than a match for a great European state
in a major war. As Paul Cambon foresaw, although the war was con-
fined to the Far East and involved neither France nor England, it was to
alter the course of history and ‘weigh upon the whole century’. 1
In the meantime a most important change had been effected in the
relations of the allies of Russia and Japan, namely, France and England.
The keys which opened the door to understanding and which explain
French policy lay in Morocco, which was virtually an enclave in France’s
North African dominions and had a long and ill-defined frontier with
Algeria. During the reign of an energetic sultan, Muley Hassan, foreign
influences had been kept at bay; but after his death in 1894 the Moroccan
realm showed signs of disintegration. Afraid that some other great power
would seek to profit by its weakness to establish its own influence there
and jeopardise the security of Algeria, Delcasse decided that it was urgent
for France to obtain recognition of her special interests. Accordingly,
having in 1900 secured Italy’s blessing, in 1902 he began negotiations
with Spain, the other Mediterranean state which by reason of its geo-
graphical position was particularly concerned with Moroccan affairs.
They failed, however, because Spain was reluctant to act without the
consent of the power which held Gibraltar. Meanwhile, however, a
rebellion which threatened Morocco with anarchy disposed Lansdowne
for the first time to consider an agreement on Morocco with France. For
both powers the desirability of a settlement was emphasised by the risk of
war in the Far East between France’s ally, Russia, and England’s new
1 ‘Tu es done sur le th&tae d’6v6nements qui peuvent changer le cours de l’bistoire
et qui vont pesersur le siecle entier. ’ Correspondance, 1870-1924, vol. 11 (Paris, 1940), p. ill.
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partner, Japan. When, early in 1903, the breakdown of Delcasse’s talks
with Spain was closely followed by news that Lansdowne might be ready
to negotiate, Cambon reported that Delcasse at last recognised that
English support in Morocco must have a price in Egypt or elsewhere.
In the negotiations which opened in August 1902 Delcasse was ably
seconded by Paul Cambon, and his task was made easier by the Francophil
disposition of Edward VII, who had ascended the throne in January 1901.
Furthermore, an exchange of visits by King Edward and President Loubet
in 1903 helped to create better feeling between the two countries. But it
was not until 8 April 1904 that the comprehensive agreement which
was the basis of the subsequent Anglo-French Entente was signed. In the
interim there had been much hard bargaining, since the discussions had
broadened out to cover the whole range of colonial interests. For England,
France’s eagerness to secure herself in Morocco afforded an obvious
opportunity to obtain France’s formal recognition of England’s position
in Egypt: but both the Moroccan and Egyptian questions had their
complexities and the hoary question of the Newfoundland fisheries
caused unexpected difficulties, for, in return for the abandonment of their
rights on the Treaty Shore, the French demanded territorial as well as
financial compensation, and their request first for Gambia and then for an
extensive area on the right bank of the Niger prolonged the negotiations
for several weeks.
The final agreement took the form of three conventions. By the first
France gave up her Newfoundland fishery rights, acquired at the Treaty
of Utrecht, in return for the lies de Los opposite Konakry and a rectifica-
tion of the frontier between Gambia and Senegambia. The second regu-
lated the condominium exercised by the two powers in the New Hebrides
and delimited spheres of influence in Siam. By the third and most impor-
tant, Britain recognised France’s special position in Morocco in return
for French recognition of the British position in Egypt. In addition there
were certain secret articles, not disclosed until 1911, which provided for
the eventuality of an alteration of the status of Egypt or Morocco, and in
particular one which secured the interests of Spain should the sultan of
Morocco at any time cease to exercise authority. The corollary of this
was a fresh Franco-Spanish negotiation resulting in the secret Franco-
Spanish convention of 3 October 1904, which defined Spain’s sphere of
influence and provided for her immediate right of action within it should
both parties agree that the status quo could no longer be preserved. Thus
Delcasse had gained the consent of three powers, Italy, England and
Spain, to France’s obtaining the lion’s share of Morocco when the
time proved ripe. But he had omitted to consult Germany, with the con-
sequence that the Anglo-French Agreement, the crowning triumph of
his career, was also to prove his downfall, although not the downfall of
his policy.
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This Agreement of 1904 was a common-sense settlement of outstanding
disputes terminating a long period of friction. It reflected the predomin-
antly imperial preoccupations of the Conservative government in England.
It envisaged no alliance; and, except in the case of Morocco, it made no
provision for future diplomatic co-operation. The very fact that its aims
were limited, whereas those of the earlier Anglo-German negotiations were
wide and ill-defined, probably helped towards its success. It was a concrete
proof of the improvement in Anglo-French relations to which the altered
tone of the British and French press already bore witness. The reality of
this improvement was soon to be put to the test and to survive triumphant.
Out of the trial came genuine entente.
Meanwhile other events disposed the two governments to co-operate.
The growth of the German fleet led the British authorities in March 1903
to decide upon the creation of a new naval base at Rosyth and to transfer
the greater part of their naval forces to home waters. French friendship
was therefore desirable because of France’s naval power in the Mediter-
ranean, notwithstanding the decline of her general strength at sea since
1902. Both governments, too, were caused anxiety by the Russo-Japanese
War and concerned to prevent it from spreading. Thus in October 1904,
when the Russian Baltic fleet on its way to the Far East inadvertently
fired by night on some Hull fishing vessels causing several casualties,
French diplomacy played an important part in inducing the Russians to
make prompt reparation. Henceforward the French, acutely aware of the
perils of Anglo-Russian friction, were tireless in urging Britain to settle her
differences with Russia even as she had settled them with France.
It was Germany who put Anglo-French friendship to its first serious
proof. Germany’s first reactions to the Anglo-French Agreement had
been conciliatory and there had been no special emphasis on German
interests in Morocco, but in reality the German Foreign Office was pro-
foundly vexed. In fact Germany’s diplomatic position had seriously
deteriorated: Italy was no longer a reliable ally, Austria-Hungary was a
prey to increasing internal difficulties, and the Franco-Russian Alliance
and Anglo-French Agreement now seemed to threaten her with encircle-
ment. The kaiser and his advisers were soon to develop a nightmare of
Einkreisung. Moreover, they were irritated at not having been consulted.
‘Not for material reasons alone’, wrote Holstein, ‘but even more for the
sake of prestige must Germany protest against the intended appropriation
of Morocco by France ... If we let ourselves be trampled upon in
Morocco, we invite similar treatment elsewhere.’ 1 The timing of the
protest required careful thought, and for some months after the first con-
ciliatory declarations Germany maintained a sphinx-like reserve. It was
1 Crosse Politik, vol. xx, pp. 208-9. Cf. G. P. Gooch, Before the War , vol. 1, p. 247.
* . . .Lassen wir uns aber jetzt in Marokko stilischweigend auf die Fiisse treten, so ermutigen
wir zur Wiederholung anderswo, ’
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not until March 1905 that the world was startled by the kaiser’s reluctant
visit to Tangier and his resounding references to Germany’s determination
to protect her ‘great and growing interests in Morocco’. The speech was
the prelude to a powerful diplomatic offensive against France and the
Anglo-French Agreement, accompanied by a violent press campaign.
There is little doubt that the timing and vigour of this apparent volte-
face in German policy were affected by the Russo-Japanese War. Now
that Russia was incapacitated Germany saw a striking opportunity to
break the incipient Entente and get rid of Delcasse as Bismarck had got
rid of Boulanger. Her desire to bring about Delcasse’s fall was increased by
Bulow’s overriding concern for Germany’s interests in the Far East and his
fear that Delcasse might be invited to mediate in the war between Russia
and Japan. There is evidence, too, that the German Chief of General
Staff favoured a preventive war against France, but, although Bulow
was ready to use the threat of war and his conduct was a vivid example of
the way in which war remained an instrument of national policy, it is
not clear that he wished to go farther. Delcasse’s offer to negotiate was
rejected and Germany demanded an international conference to discuss
the Moroccan situation. If the French stood firm there was risk of war;
if they yielded, they would also be humiliated. Delcasse urged firmness
on the ground that Germany was bluffing and that English support was
assured. This was going too far; although England was stirred by the
challenge to Anglo-French relations implied by Germany’s conduct, all
Lansdowne had suggested was ‘full and confidential discussion between
the two Gov[emmen]ts ... in anticipation of any complications to be appre-
hended during the somewhat anxious period through which we are at
present passing’. 1 Delcasse and his advisers, however, appear to have
interpreted this statement in the light of unofficial assurances of military
support which they believed to have been given by British service chiefs.
But his colleagues placed less reliance on England, knowing that the
British navy, her main strength, could not ‘run on wheels’, 2 and were
painfully aware of Germany’s military superiority. They rejected Delcasse’s
risky policy and he resigned on 6 June. Rouvier’s offer of a Franco-
German agreement was turned down by Bulow, and France was obliged to
accept the proposal for a conference. It might now be hoped that France
would realise that English support was worthless. When in the next month
the kaiser secured a treaty with Russia which seemed to take the sting out
of the Franco-Russian Alliance his elation was unbounded, for it looked
as though the whole grouping of the European powers was about to be
transformed to Germany’s advantage. But what he beheld was a mirage.
The kaiser had encouraged the tsar to go to war with Japan, and in
1904, when war broke out, Germany, seeing an opportunity to try and
1 British Documents, vol. in, no. 95 .
* An expression used by the French President du Conseil, M. Rouvier.
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‘mend the wire to St Petersburg’, sent a draft treaty of defensive alliance
to the Russian capital. Nothing came of it because the tsar felt that he
would be bound to consult France if it were proceeded with; but Ger-
many continued her courtship and strained her neutrality by coaling
Russian ships, and in the following year in a tete-a-tete at Bjorko in
Finland, the kaiser persuaded the tsar to sign a treaty whereby, if one
of the signatories was attacked by a European power, the other would
support it in Europe. But the handiwork of the sovereigns was not
found to be good in the sight of their absent ministers. Btilow, who
thought that the words ‘in Europe’ made the treaty a liability when
England with her vulnerable Indian empire was the enemy in view, actually
went so far as to telegraph his resignation (which, however, he was per-
suaded to withdraw) ; while Lamsdorff at once declared such an arrange-
ment impossible without reference to Russia’s ally France, whom the
Germans wanted to bring in only after the fait accompli. When the
Russians sounded France about the possibility of extending the Franco-
Russian Alliance to include Germany, they obtained the expected answer
that French opinion would not tolerate a closer relationship. The tsar’s con-
sequent letter proposing an additional provision that the treaty should not
apply in case of war between France and Germany ended the matter. In an
alliance so emasculated Germany could have no interest and so, although
never formally abrogated, the Treaty of Bjorko was virtually stillborn.
These negotiations affected the development of the Moroccan question.
So long as there was a chance of forming the grand continental alliance
with France and Russia the Germans had been conciliatory in their
demeanour towards the French after Delcasse’s resignation. But, once
that project failed, the Moroccan question remained the chief card to
play against the Anglo-French Entente. The return of a Liberal govern-
ment in England encouraged Germany to resume an uncompromising
tone, and she looked to the international conference she had demanded
to give her satisfaction.
Once again, however, she was doomed to disappointment. At the
conference which opened at Algeciras on 16 January 1906 she gained
only Austrian support on the most contentious issue, namely, the organisa-
tion of police in the Moroccan ports. Italy failed to back her, while
Russia, urgently in need of a large French loan, stood firmly by France
and England. The majority accepted the French view that the police
organisation should be entrusted to French and Spanish officers; and
the eventual compromise, incorporated in the Algeciras Act of 7 April
1906, whereby, while the sultan was to confide the organisation to French
and Spanish officers, a Swiss inspector-general was to be superimposed
who would make periodic reports to the Diplomatic Body on the func-
tioning of the new police regime, was but poor consolation. The only
advantage Germany had derived was the recognition that Moroccan
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affairs were a matter of international interest. To this extent France’s
desired freedom of action was restricted and the recognition meant that
Germany could legitimately bring up the Moroccan question again should
occasion arise. Apart from this, however, Algeciras was a serious check:
Germany’s diplomacy had overreached itself and her relative isolation
had been publicly exposed ; she had failed to obtain any tangible advan-
tage for herself; and, last but not least, she had failed to break the Entente.
Indeed the new Foreign Secretary, Grey, attached more importance to the
Entente than Lansdowne. Not only had the British government given
France their diplomatic support, but they had hinted that, in the event
of a German attack upon France, England could not remain neutral.
Furthermore, although he had refused to give France a written under-
taking of armed support. Grey, without the knowledge of the Cabinet,
agreed in January 1906 that staff conversations, already tentatively begun,
should take place as a precautionary measure. It was expressly stipulated
that these talks should be in no way binding on either government, but the
fact that they could occur was of the highest significance and committed
the British authorities more than they knew. England had returned un-
mistakably to her traditional policy of maintaining the European balance
of power.
Although the Treaty of Bjorko was secret, an indication that something
was stirring the waters was conveyed by the Russian soundings in Paris
and made a settlement of Anglo- Russian differences all the more desirable.
The failure of Germany’s schemes for an anti-British continental alliance,
Russia’s defeat by Japan, her co-operation with the Entente powers at
Algeciras, fear of German influence penetrating Persia, and the change of
policy favoured by Isvolsky, who became Russian Foreign Minister on
10 May 1906, all facilitated matters, and negotiations were formally
opened on 6 June. Their progress was rendered slow by the internal
instability of Russia and by public criticism in England of the measures
taken to cope with it, by Isvolsky’s understandable desire not to offend
Germany and suffer the fate of Delcasse, and by the objections of the
Russian General Staff; but eventually a convention was signed on
3 1 August 1 907. From the British point of view the agreement, which related
to three points of friction, Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, was satisfactory
since the main objectives were secured. Russia’s recognition of the
principle of Persian independence and integrity and the delimitation of
spheres of influence within that country, her acknowledgement that
Afghanistan was of special interest to England, and agreement to maintain
Tibet as a buffer state under Chinese suzerainty, all appeared to check any
further expansion menacing to the safety of India, which was England’s
paramount concern. Although the Persian problem would still cause the
British Foreign Office many headaches, the great Anglo-Russian conflict
of interests was virtually liquidated by the agreements.
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The Anglo- Russian convention was negative in character : it contained
no special assurances of friendship or co-operation and it was not wel-
comed in either country as the Anglo-French Agreement had been
welcomed in England and France. Although it swung Russia slightly
nearer to the Entente it did not preclude her from maintaining good
relations with Germany; indeed Isvolsky was most anxious to do so and
went out of his way to be co-operative, for instance at the ineffective
second Hague conference in 1907. Nor, although Grey saw Russia as a
counterpoise to Germany, was it part of a deliberate English design to
encircle Germany. As has been well said, the two groups stood side by side
rather than face to face and it was ‘not a question of getting Russia to
join England against Germany: it was solely a question of preventing
Russia from joining Germany against England’. 1 Unfortunately, how-
ever, Germany saw in it an anti-German move, and this impression
was strengthened when the tsar and King Edward VII met at Reval
in June 1908. Unfortunately, too, the convention had the effect of
shifting the main direction of Russia’s foreign policy to still more
dangerous waters. Checked by Japan in the Far East, prevented from
further expansion in the direction of India, she turned once more to the
Balkans.
But it was Austrian initiative which led to the first major Balkan
crisis of the twentieth century. The Magyarising policy of the Hungarian
government and the resentment it caused among their Serb and Croat
populations intensified the racial problems of the dual monarchy. The
deterioration of Austria’s relations with Serbia since the sanguinary over-
throw of the Obrenovich dynasty in 1903 and the tendency of the new
Serbian rulers to look to France for money and munitions and to Russia
for political support and to allow Belgrade to become a centre of Pan-Serb
aspirations confronted the rulers of Austria with a foreign problem which
was likely to be all the more difficult once Russia resumed an active
interest in Balkan politics. So long as the Pole, Goluchowski, remained
in charge, Austrian policy was cautious. But his replacement in 1906 by
Aehrenthal and the appointment of Conrad von Hotzendorff as Chief of
Staff brought to the fore men of more masterful stamp anxious to restore
their country’s declining prestige. Aehrenthal, who had been Ambassador
at St Petersburg, was, like Isvolsky, Billow and others, an example of the
typical continental Foreign Minister trained in the narrow school of
diplomacy instead of in politics. As he was reputed to be on excellent terms
with the Russians and anxious to reconstitute the Three Emperors’
League, his appointment was regarded as an earnest of Austria’s desire to
maintain friendly relations with Russia. But when his initial attempts at
economic conciliation with Serbia broke down, largely owing to opposi-
tion at home, he embarked upon a coercive policy which quickly led to
1 H. Nicolson, op. cit. pp. 234-5.
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complications. His announcement early in 1908 of Austria’s intention to
build a railway to Mitrovitza in Turkey through the Sanjak of Novibazar,
which separated Serbia from Montenegro, was intended as a warning to
Serbia. But, made regardless of Russia’s friendly intimation that complica-
tions might ensue, it virtually ended the Austro-Russian co-operation in
the Balkans begun in 1897, and inaugurated a period in which the
growing personal enmity of Aehrenthal and Isvolsky had the gravest
consequences for European relations.
At first Russia made a counter-proposal for a railway from the Danube
to the Albanian coast, and the next months might have witnessed no more
than a competition in railway projects had not the general situation been
transformed by the Young Turk revolution at Constantinople in July.
By the Berlin Treaty of 1878 Austria had been accorded the right to
administer the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina indefinitely
and to garrison the Sanjak of Novibazar. The Young Turk revolution
confronted Austria with the probability that the predominantly Serb
populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina would demand the right to send
representatives to the Turkish Parliament, now proposed, and that Turkey,
infused with a new nationalism, would reassert her claim to full sovereignty
over two provinces which Austria had in fact governed for thirty years.
The grant of such demands was inconceivable for the Austrian rulers and
Aehrenthal’s remedy, approved by his government in August, was the
annexation of the two provinces at a suitable moment, accompanied as
a conciliatory gesture to Turkey by the withdrawal of Austrian troops
from the Sanjak. ‘Annexation’, as has been said, ‘would both solve the
confused relations with Turkey and create an insuperable barrier against
the seditious dream of a great South Slav kingdom; Serbo-Croat unrest,
with nothing to hope for from Serbia, would be silenced, and the monarchy
would now be free to accomplish the mission of economic betterment which
thirty years of occupation had left unfulfilled.’ 1 For the success of the
scheme Russian support was essential, and negotiations to this end cul-
minated in a secret interview between Aehrenthal and Isvolsky at Buchlau
on 16 September. As a result Aehrenthal believed that he had secured
Russian approval for the projected annexation, in return for Austrian
support of a Russian proposal to modify the Straits regime so as to give
the warships of the Black Sea powers free access to the Mediterranean.
But the plan miscarried. When Isvolsky went on to Paris and London
he encountered difficulties. France was non-committal and England would
not agree to his Straits proposals : the Cabinet felt no obligation to sup-
port Russia because of the recent Anglo-Russian agreements and was
unmoved by Isvolsky’s talk of the consequences for Anglo-Russian rela-
tions if his demands were not met. Meanwhile Aehrenthal, eager to
secure Austria’s share of the bargain, had declared the annexation of
1 A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815-1918 (London, 1941), p. 260.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina on 6 October, the day after the prince of Bulgaria,
acting in collusion with him, had proclaimed his country’s complete
independence of Turkey and assumed the title of king. Thus Isvolsky’s
policy had broken down while Aehrenthal’s had triumphed. Isvolsky had
aimed at a coup in the Straits, a misdirected aim since the Russian people
were more easily roused on behalf of the Balkan Slavs than by the old
Straits question, but he had to return without this quid pro quo of the
Buchlau bargain. Much mortified, he sought escape by asserting that he
had been duped by Aehrenthal, demanding a European conference to
discuss the Bosnian question, and encouraging the Balkan Slav agitation
which followed upon the annexation.
Aehrenthal’s attempt to solve the Serb problem thus led to a grave
crisis which lasted for six months. To most European powers his action
came as a shock. Although it made no practical difference to the two
provinces, it was, as Grey wrote, the ‘ arbitrary alteration of a European
Treaty by one Power without the consent of the others’ and as such ‘struck
at the roots of all good international order’. 1 In consequence, England
condemned the annexation just as she had condemned Russia’s denuncia-
tion of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris in 1870. To Germany
the Austrian fait accompli was equally unwelcome. Biilow was indignant
at not having been consulted beforehand by his ally and the kaiser saw
his cherished Turkish policy in jeopardy. Yet Germany could not afford
to see Austria weakened, and therefore supported Austria in her refusal
of any conference which did not meet merely to confirm the annexation.
Since the failure of the Bjorko policy and the signature of the Anglo-
Russian agreement Germany was all the readier to bolster up Austria
by winning a diplomatic victory against Russia.
In the Balkans Austria’s action had provoked a ferment: ‘Turkey for-
mally protested, and a boycott of Austrian goods began; Montenegro
begged for frontier modifications and abolition of the fetters of the Berlin
Treaty; in Serbia there was talk of war.’ 2 As the rift between Austria
and Russia became apparent so the bellicosity of the Serbs, who hoped
for Russian aid, increased and Austro-Russian relations drifted into a
state of dangerous tension. The decisive factor was the firm support given
to Austria by Germany. After Biilow had rejected an offer of mediation
by the Western Powers, Austria felt strong enough to demand Serbia’s
withdrawal of her opposition to the annexation, and when the Serbs
complied but refused to give a written promise of future good behaviour
she prepared for coercion. All in fact depended on Russia and Germany,
for Serbia could not risk war without Russian assistance and Germany
was determined to prevent that assistance from being forthcoming. On
22 March 1909 the German Ambassador in St Petersburg was instructed
1 Viscount Grey, Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916 (London, 1925), vol. 1, p. 175.
8 G. P. Gooch, Before the War, vol. 1, p. 403.
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to obtain a definite reply to the question whether Russia accepted the
Austrian note and the abrogation of the article of the Treaty of Berlin
relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina. ‘ We should regard an evasive, conditional
or ambiguous reply as a refusal. We should then withdraw and let things
take their course.’ 1 Unready to face another major war so soon after her
defeat by Japan, Russia could only submit, whereupon Serbia too
climbed down and gave the required guarantee. Turkey had already on
26 February acknowledged the annexation in return for an indemnity of
some £2,400,000. Aehrenthal’s triumph was complete.
But it boded ill for the future. So far from cowing the Serbs it antagon-
ised them further and made Austria’s Slav problem still more difficult.
It was a blow to what international morality remained and, above all, a
bitter humiliation for Russia, who had been helpless while Serbia was
browbeaten and had to accept Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Herze-
govina without compensation either in the Straits or elsewhere. In
consequence, Germany’s dreams of a continental alliance and Austria’s
visions of a new Three Emperors’ League were farther than ever from
fulfilment : still more so after the German emperor had rubbed salt into
Russia’s wounds by declaring that he had supported Austria ‘in shining
armour’. The Bosnian crisis did what neither the Anglo-Russian conven-
tion nor the meeting of sovereigns at Reval had been able to achieve: it
created the Triple Entente. Although Russia was disappointed by lack of
support from France and England and some British diplomats, aware of
this, vainly urged Grey to convert England’s ententes into alliances, she
could not afford to retire into isolation, and co-operation with the Western
Powers was the only alternative. Germany’s attempt to mend the wire
by an offer in 1910 to abandon support of Austria in the Balkans in return
for a Russian promise not to help England against Germany came to
nothing. Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans was again a dominating
and dangerous factor in European politics. Moreover, the change in the
Balkan balance of power had alarmed Italy, causing her to move still
farther away from Austria, against whom Italian irredentist feeling was
always strong, and to conclude the secret Treaty of Racconigi (24 October
1909) with Russia, whereby she undertook to support the Balkan status
quo, should it again be threatened by Austria, in return for Russian
recognition of her interests in Tripoli. In reply Austria tried to safeguard
her position by promising not to make any new annexation without prior
agreement with Rome to give Italy compensation. But, apart from
German support, she was now isolated and, in consequence, her influence
in the Balkans declined. Biilow had grievously miscalculated. By his un-
conditional aid to Austria he had committed himself to the support of
1 ‘...Jede ausweichende verklausulierte Oder unklare Antwort wiirden wir als eine
Ablehnung betrachten miissen. Wir wtirden uns dartn zuriickziehen und den Dingen ihren
Lauf lassen. . . ’ (Crosse Politik, vol. xxvi, p. 694).
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methods and aims of which he disapproved and about which he had not
been fully consulted. Furthermore, and still more ominous for the future,
there was now a danger that Austria would take fresh risks, firm in the
conviction that Germany would be obliged to stand by her. The roles had
been reversed and it had been Germany’s turn to play the part of ‘brilliant
second’ to Austria. As in the Moroccan affair Btilow had hoped to break
the Anglo-French Entente, so now his policy was explicable partly by his
avowed desire to break ‘the encircling ring’; and, as in 1905-6, it had
precisely the opposite effect. The ‘ring’, hitherto mainly a figment of
German imagination, began to assume reality. It was unlikely to dissolve
so long as the thunder-clouds hung over the Balkans and the North Sea.
Even as Austria’s Balkan policy seemed a threat to Russia, so Germany’s
naval programme seemed an unprovoked menace to England.
Although the early German Naval Bills and jingoistic propaganda of
the German Navy League had attracted much attention, the German
naval programme did not become a diplomatic issue and a leading factor
in Anglo-German relations until 1906. By this time the Moroccan crisis
with its risk of war had made the British government aware that friction
with Germany would inevitably increase the pace and burden of highly
unwelcome competition in naval armaments. The Liberals who assumed
office in 1905 were eager to reduce expenditure, and accordingly in 1906,
welcoming the Russian invitation to a second Hague conference, they
proposed a limitation of armaments. Such a proposal was hardly likely
to be acceptable in Germany. By now, as a result of constant propaganda,
the majority of the German people had come to believe that a big navy
was essential for the maintenance of Germany’s interests and prestige as
a great power or, as Bethmann-Hollweg put it in 1912, ‘for the general
purposes of her greatness’. The implementation of the naval programmes
was regarded as a fundamental point of policy. It was one of the few
aims to which the volatile German emperor remained unflinchingly con-
stant and its modification would probably have required a radical change
of men and outlook. Moreover, England’s proposals were necessarily
suspect, for she now appeared to demand recognition of her naval
superiority for all time. The Hague conference of 1907 therefore merely
increased distrust. With no hope of international agreement to limit
armaments, the only course left was that of direct discussions. Mean-
while the ‘dry war’ of the armaments race continued, since for Britain
naval superiority was a matter of life and death and the pretension of
Germany, the strongest military state, to bid for equality at sea was a
grave risk to the balance of power.
At first the Germans were unwilling to negotiate, but eventually Biilow,
constantly warned by Metternich, the German Ambassador in London,
of the strength of English feeling (intensified by the belief, justifiably
shared by the British government in the winter of 1908-9, that Germany
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had been accelerating the building of her ships), considered the possibility
of slowing down Germany’s naval construction in return for a promise
of British neutrality. But Tirpitz’s reply to such a suggestion in the spring
of 1909 was unpromising — his suggested ratio of 3:4 was hardly likely
to be acceptable — and before any overture was made to England Biilow
had resigned and was succeeded, in June 1909, by Bethmann-Hollweg.
Bethmann-Hollweg, a not very forceful civilian and a newcomer to foreign
affairs, was unlikely to make a radical change in policy. He did, however,
accept Biilow’s notion of securing a political bargain, and negotiations
begun in 1909 continued intermittently but fruitlessly until 1912. Beth-
mann’s offer was to retard the German naval programme, not to reduce
it, in exchange for British neutrality in case of an attack upon Germany.
Such an undertaking would have been difficult for England in view of her
commitments to other powers, even if the naval concessions offered had
been greater; but her repeated assurance that the treaties and ententes
she had concluded were not directed against Germany, and her offers
to make an agreement on outstanding questions such as the Baghdad
Railway, were not considered enough. Grey’s proposals for exchanges
of naval in formation also came to nothing and in 19 11 negotiations
seemed near a deadlock when a fresh Moroccan crisis blew up to imperil
European peace and increase Anglo-German mistrust.
The Algeciras Act had not restored order to the Shereefian empire.
In 1907 the sultan had been driven from his capital and a state of anarchy
ensued which encouraged French penetration. However, in 1909, when
both powers were preoccupied by the Bosnian crisis, Germany had come
to an agreement with France which disquieted British opinion and seemed
to foreshadow a new period of Franco-German co-operation. While both
governments undertook that their nationals should be associated in the
enterprises for which they obtained concessions, Germany expressed her
‘political disinterest’ in Morocco. But the economic side of the agreement
gave rise to misunderstandings, especially when France proposed to build
railways and refused to admit German personnel to run them on the
grounds that this trenched upon her political interests. By 19 11 relations
had deteriorated, while fresh disorders impelled the French to send troops
to Fez. The French government had already made overtures to Berlin for
a revised agreement when the Germans reopened the Moroccan question
with a startling gesture reminiscent of the Tangier incident of 1905. On
1 July a gunboat, the Panther, was sent to the closed Moroccan port of
Agadir to protect alleged German commercial interests and the world was
informed that since, in the German view, the occupation of Fez nullified the
Algeciras Act, the time had come for a fresh ‘ friendly exchange of views ’.
There was much to be said for the German argument that a military
expedition like the French one to Fez was only too likely to turn into a
permanent occupation and that France and Germany must reconsider
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
their Moroccan arrangements; but Germany’s manner of proceeding was
open to serious criticism although Zimmermann, her Under-Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs, had argued that it was the only way to induce France
to offer satisfactory compensation. For some days after the Panther's arrival
at Agadir, Kiderlen, now Secretary of State, imitated the sphinx-like
silence of Bulow in the first Moroccan crisis and tension was acute. There
was much uncertainty as to Germany’s ultimate intentions : for instance, as
there were no commercial interests in the Agadir region it was believed
by many that she intended to demand or seize an Atlantic port. The
French Foreign Minister had at first asked the British government to
make a counter-demonstration; they refused this but warned Germany
that they could not recognise any new arrangement which was come to
in Morocco without them. Meanwhile Caillaux, the new Germanophil
French Prime Minister, accepted the German suggestion of an ‘ exchange
of views’. The Germans then revealed their hand. In return for recogni-
tion of France’s complete freedom of action in Morocco they demanded
practically the whole French Congo. When the French Cabinet on 17 July
rejected their terms it seems that Kiderlen was ready to envisage war or
at least to use the threat of it in order to intimidate the French into com-
pliance. In these circumstances the attitude of England (who had on
13 July prudently renewed her alliance with Japan for a further ten years)
was of decisive importance. On 21 July Grey told the German Ambassador
in London that Germany’s demands were excessive and that her action at
Agadir still required explanation, and Lloyd George, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, who was believed in Berlin to be the leader of the pro-
German section in the Cabinet, declared in a resounding speech at the
Mansion House that if Britain were ‘ to be treated where her interests were
vitally affected as of no account . . . peace at that price would be a humilia-
tion intolerable for a great country to endure’. There was no mention of
Germany or the Moroccan question, but the warning was clear, and the
indignation of the German government and people showed that they knew
that their bluff had been called — courteous assurances about Germany’s
intentions were speedily sent to London. Peace was preserved, but German
prestige had suffered and there followed several weeks of hard bargaining
between France and Germany during which there were twice threats of
rupture and renewed rumours of war. Finally, a financial panic in Germany
in September accelerated a settlement and on 4 November 1911 a fresh
Franco-German agreement was signed. While Germany undertook not
to impede French activity in Morocco and recognised France’s right
eventually to establish a protectorate there, France ceded part of the
interior of the French Congo pointing towards the Belgian Congo (on
which the Germans hoped to obtain a pre-emption) together with a strip
of territory giving this new German acquisition access to the sea.
Although Delcasse’s policy had triumphed in the end and France was
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY I 900 -I 9 I 2
now potentially mistress of Morocco, and although Germany had ex-
tended her colonial dominion at small cost to herself, the Agadir crisis
left neither side content. In Germany Kiderlen, who had countenanced
if not encouraged the public clamour for territorial compensation in
Morocco, was strongly criticised, and the Colonial Secretary resigned in
protest at the weakness of his policy; while in France the settlement was
also attacked by colonial interests, and the discovery that Caillaux had
conducted part of the negotiations independently of his Foreign Minister
led in January 1912 to the fall of his Cabinet. He had indeed hoped to
make the Moroccan question the basis of a general settlement of dif-
ferences with Germany on the lines of the Anglo-French Agreement of
1904; but the hope was vain, for the methods of German diplomacy and
the strong feeling roused in both countries made its realisation im-
practicable. Instead of bettering relations with Germany, Agadir had
demonstrated once again the solidity of France’s entente with England.
In view of the risk of war, staff conversations had been resinned. England
had already been making plans for the dispatch of an expeditionary force
to France in case of emergency and now discussion of the technical details
was pressed on apace. Still more conspicuous was the deterioration of
Germany’s relations with England, who now knew that for her the dominant
questions of international relations were whether she intended to maintain
the Triple Entente and whether she ‘ought to submit to any dictation
by Germany whenever she considers it necessary to raise her voice’. 1
One further consequence of Agadir remains to be noticed. By opening
the way to the French protectorate of Morocco, which was actually
established early in 1912, it impelled Italy to move upon Tripoli. Already
alarmed by Young Turk nationalism and fearing German competition,
Italy believed she must act ‘now or never’. On 25 September 1911,
without warning, she published a statement of grievances against Turkey,
and four days later, having rejected Turkish offers to negotiate, she
declared war. The Treaty of Paris of 1856 guaranteeing the independence
and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Berlin of
1878 which had reaffirmed that guarantee, and the Hague conventions
to which Italy was a party were flung to the winds. She was determined
to leave no time for outside intervention and had not even consulted her
allies beforehand. She found her justification in the fact that three great
powers, France, Austria and Russia, had all signed agreements giving
her a free hand. A further blow had been dealt at international morality,
and Italy’s conquest and annexation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was
the signal for the Balkan states to make a concerted attack upon Turkey.
The new complications caused by the Balkan wars are part of the imme-
diate prelude to world war.
1 Sir A. Nicolson to Sir Edward Goschen, 24 July 191 1 and to Lord Hardinge, 14 Sep-
tember 1911. Quoted in H. Nicolson, op. cit. pp. 347, 350.
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CHAPTER VI
THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF 1 9 1 4 1
T he ‘first world war’ is a misnomer. Its causes were no more
world-wide than its battlefields. The national antagonisms which
exploded in it were European, and the alignment of the belligerent
powers inside and outside Europe did not correspond to the lines of real
cleavage between either the imperial interests of European powers or
extra-European national ambitions. As world-wide causes have been
assigned to the war, so also have causes comparatively remote in time.
In each case the enlargement in retrospect of its true limits above all
reflects the magnitude of the experience for contemporaries. But it
accords as well with the preoccupations of various doctrinaire schools of
international and national politics and history which have helped form
popular interpretations of the war. The dogma, for instance, that war
at this stage of history must express ‘imperialist contradictions’ — one
not confined to Marxists — required that the war should be treated as
global, while the doctrine current in post-war Europe that it was the
necessary result of German authoritarian militarism required that the
origins of the war should be traced back to the foundation of the second
German empire. 2
Most schools of interpretation, however, accept a distinction between
remote and immediate origins of the war of 1914 and to most a dividing
line in 1912 makes sense, if not for all the same reasons. Then began the
crucial developments in two of the three main causes of the crisis of July
1914, or at least of the final order of battle, the alliance system and
Balkan nationalism — the third being Anglo-German naval rivalry. Then,
too, as distinct from those European issues, the last cause of conflict over-
seas had just been extinguished by a Franco-German agreement over
Morocco.
The Moroccan convention of November 19 11 licensed a French pro-
tectorate in exchange for territorial cessions in central Africa, and its
critical reception by both French and German nationalists is one measure
of its merits. In France, Caillaux’s government which made it was replaced
by the so-called ‘ great ministry’ of Poincare which accepted the settlement
while appearing less disposed to further appeasement. It was one of
Poincare’s first preoccupations to overhaul the Russian alliance, which
1 The editor and author are greatly indebted to Dr A. E. Campbell for abridging the text
of this contribution.
8 The widest range of non-Marxist ‘sociological’ interpretation is comprehended in
George W. F. Hallgarten, Imperialismus vor 1914: Soziologische Darstellung der deutschen
Aussenpolitik (Munich, 1951 ; revised ed. 1962).
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
the Moroccan crisis had shown to be as inadequate a moral support for
France as the Bosnian crisis four years earlier had shown it to be for
Russia. But the crucial fact was that the Russians met Poincare more
than half way, for it was apparent that the next international crisis would
be a Balkan one in which Russia had more to gain than France. The
Russians therefore took the diplomatic initiative. The Balkan League
developed early in 1912 under Russian patronage but without the co-
operation or indeed full awareness of the French; it remained to commit
them nevertheless to its risks.
Meanwhile it was in Germany that the Moroccan agreement was pro-
ducing the most far-reaching repercussions. In the settlement with France
Germany had, said Admiral Tirpitz, ‘suffered a diplomatic check, and
we must salve it by a supplementary naval bill’. 1 As Naval Secretary he
gained the support of the Kaiser Wilhelm for this bill, usually known as
the novelle of 1912, against the opposition of the Chancellor, Bethmann-
Hollweg. Though loyal to it in negotiation, Bethmann was unsympathetic
to the political strategy behind the German battle-fleet — that it would
serve as a deterrent to British intervention in a continental war. Under
Tirpitz’s original ‘risk theory’, the German fleet had only to make victory
so costly to the British fleet that it would be vulnerable to third powers,
but this had become inadequate as the other naval powers, except isola-
tionist America, had become British associates rather than potential
enemies. The German fleet had therefore to aim higher — it needed at
least a hope of victory — and Tirpitz, with a reasonable confidence in the
superiority of German design, was thinking in terms of parity by 1920. 2
The competition in oceanic cruisers was secondary, but it kept for the
navy the support of influential colonial and commercial pressure-groups.
British numerical superiority in up-to-date battleships had been sacri-
ficed by the completion of the revolutionary Dreadnought in 1908. It
was being regained, particularly since the slogan of ‘two keels for one’
had been accepted by the public and the Admiralty. But this naval
competition strained the Liberal government’s principles as well as their
budgets, and when a forecast of the novelle reached London it found them
ready to negotiate once more. The visit to Berlin of the supposedly
Germanophil Secretary of State for War, Haldane, followed in February
1912. But the Germans asked for concessions over German colonial
expansion, and over the continuation of the German Baghdad railway
to the British-dominated Persian Gulf; they even asked for a declara-
tion of neutrality. And when the text of the novelle was examined in
London it was found to involve large increases in personnel, as well as
the raising of a fresh battle squadron from some old and some new ships,
while all that had been offered was postponement of these last. That
1 Tirpitz, My Memoirs, vol. 1 (English edition, London, 1919), p. 211.
2 E. L. Woodward, Great Britain and the German Navy (Oxford, 1935), p. 316.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
was not worth colonial concessions, still less what amounted to the
abandonment of the entente with France.
The kaiser may have gained a genuine impression that agreement had
been reached during his talks with Haldane, although the latter had
neither full powers nor full information. He affected indignation at being
let down, but negotiations were allowed to drag on in London. The offer
of a British declaration of non-aggression proved unacceptable, and
Bethmann instructed the German ambassador in London that an agree-
ment ‘pledging England’s neutrality and nearly amounting to a defensive
alliance with us’ was the sole condition which would justify the amend-
ment of the novelle . 1 This fully endorsed Tirpitz’s doctrine of the deterrent
function of the German battle-fleet. Moreover, the deterrent had to be
recognised by the British; the official tendency in London to treat the
German fleet as merely a prestige symbol was resented as insulting.
The British answer to the novelle appeared in the Admiralty estimates
of 1 8 July. British additional construction would be nearly double the
new German increases, and these rates of building to maintain a ratio of
8:5m battleships were maintained until the outbreak of war. But Tirpitz,
in an inconsistent decision, slowed down building under the novelle. The
British estimates were adjusted proportionately, and so the impulse was
supplied for Churchill’s proposal, repeated in 1913, for a ‘naval holiday’
with no new building for one year on either side. That was the last plan
for naval limitation and it was ill-received in Germany as being, for
technical reasons, favourable to Britain.
The naval stalemate, however, did not exacerbate relations. The Ger-
man government still did not recognise that instead of imposing neutrality
the uncompromising character of the naval challenge was making neutral-
ity more obviously impossible. The idea of a ‘political agreement’ with
Britain was to persist in German diplomatic strategy until the end. It did
so without encouragement from London, but the two remaining themes
in the Haldane negotiations, a colonial bargain and a Mesopotamian rail-
way settlement, were more profitably taken up and developed slowly during
the next two years into agreements stillborn on the outbreak of war.
The Anglo-German negotiations were alarming to the French and to the
committed friends of France. 2 The French therefore exploited the refusal
of a neutrality declaration to the Germans with a request for declarations
about the Entente. They were helped by the simultaneous development of
naval strategy. A reinforcement of the British battle-fleet in home waters
from the Mediterranean was carried through, and, although it was for-
mally declared to be unco-ordinated with French naval movements,
1 Bethmann to Mettemich, 18 March 1912, Die Grosse Politik der Europaischen Kabinette,
1871-1914 (Berlin, 1922-7 ), vol. xxxi, no. 11406.
2 The British Ambassador in Paris, Bertie, even incited Poincare against his own govern-
ment (R. Poincar6, Au Service de la France, Paris, 1927-33, vol. 1, p. 170).
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I 9 T 4
French battleships were transferred in the reverse direction so that a naval
obligation to defend the Channel coast of France began to build up.
It was rather to check than to establish this developing strategic link,
that Grey decided to give it formal but secret definition in an exchange
of letters with the French Ambassador on 16 and 17 November 1912.
These expressly stated that the redisposition of the fleets involved no
engagement, any more than the military and staff talks — which went back
to 1906. But Grey’s letter continued by promising consultation in case
of an apprehended attack or a general threat to peace from a third power,
and then recourse to the joint staff plans if action were decided upon.
This fundamental text of the ‘Entente cordiale’ was not disclosed out-
side the British Cabinet until the outbreak of war, except to the Russians
earlier in 1914 as a concession to the French wish to formalise the Triple
Entente. It was then, too, that British naval staff talks were secretly
arranged with the Russians for the same diplomatic reason, though their
strategic significance was negligible. Indeed, the independent bond be-
tween Russia and Britain was tenuous — the security that it gave to Russia
came solely through British obligations or intentions towards France.
Direct Anglo-Russian relations were still troubled by Russian political
intervention in Persia. The Russians, Sazonov believed, could presume on
ultimate British complaisance in Asia for the sake of ‘political aims in
Europe of vital importance’. 1 But the reverse process was also effective,
and friction continued until July 1914.
While the Entente owed its ‘ triple’ character to the two-way relationship
of France within it, the rigour of the Franco-Russian alliance attenuated
the British obligation to France. As Grey was to insist at the last moment
in 1914, Britain was not morally bound to follow France in action imposed
on the latter by a treaty such as Britain had deliberately refrained from
concluding even with France, much less Russia. All the more was this
the case when the French commitment to Russia became extended by the
entanglement of Russian policy and prestige with the so-called Balkan
League. The basis of the league was the treaty of alliance between Serbia
and Bulgaria, signed on 13 March 1912.* Its ostensible purpose was to
resist Austro-Hungarian expansion, but a secret annexe provided for the
partition of Macedonia, the remaining Slav-speaking territories under
Turkish rule. The Russians were accessory to the negotiations from the
start; they were not merely implicated by the important provision that
the tsar should arbitrate between the parties. Their motives were not
solely adventurous, nor those of revenge for the diplomatic defeat over
Bosnia in 1908-9. Fear of Austria-Hungary re-occupying the Sanjak of
1 B. von Siebert, Diplomatische Aktenstiicke zur Geschichte der Ententepolitik der
Vorkriegsjahre (Berlin, 1921), pp. 205-6.
1 29 February, o.s. The texts of ail the Balkan League treaties are to be found in the
appendices to J. E. Gudchoff, La Genese de la guerre mondiale (Berne, 1919).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
Novibazar to keep Montenegro and Serbia apart and to push a projected
railway through it all the way to Salonika was a genuine and early motive.
Later the temptation of opportunities for Russia in the partition of Tur-
key came to the fore, although how the leadership of Balkan national
ambitions was to bring Russia to the coveted control of Constantinople
and the Straits had not been thought out.
The facts of the alliance between the Balkan states were incompletely
revealed to their French allies by the Russians, in spite of pressing French
enquiries, until Poincare’s visit to Russia in August 1912. When Poincare
did see the text of the secret Serbo-Bulgarian treaty he told Sazonov
that ‘France would not give Russia military aid over Balkan issues if
Germany did not provoke the casus foederis of her own initiative, that
is if she did not attack Russia The reference was to the military conven-
tion of 1 892, which provided that ‘ if Russia is attacked by Germany or
by Austria supported by Germany, France will employ all the forces at
her disposal to fight Germany’. This was the basis of the Dual Alliance
ratified in treaty form in 1894. But it had become increasingly obvious
since 1908 that the emergency causing Russia to call upon the alliance
would be an Austrian attack on a Balkan Slav state, followed by Russian
intervention against Austria and in turn German intervention against
Russia. Poincare was in fact implying support in the new circumstances,
otherwise the necessary reservation would have been that Russia should
not attack Austria first. Reaffirming the alliance obligation without this
caution, as Poincare did in 19 12, 1 meant that the defensive character of
the alliance had been changed, or alternatively that Austria’s Slav neigh-
bours were henceforth included in it. There is little doubt that Poincare
yielded to Russian importunities for fear of losing the whole alliance,
which he considered precious to France in its defensive form. That he
does not make the point in his memoirs follows from his refusal to admit
that the alliance was in fact transformed in Russian interests.
When Poincare was in St Petersburg a conflict in the Balkans was
imminent. Greece had joined Serbia and Bulgaria in a treaty concluded
on 29 May, to which Montenegro had committed herself orally, and the
whole Balkan League meant to take advantage of the continuing war
between Turkey and Italy which had been one of the incentives to its
formation and was now stimulating insurrection in Albania and Macedonia.
The Balkan crises tested Austro-German solidarity over the same
strategic issues, if not in such a dramatic situation as that of 1914, and
the question arises why they did not produce the same fatal result. The
common supposition that Germany simply refused support to Austria-
Hungary in 19 12-13 and accorded it in 1914 misrepresents the course of
events. Both Austrian policy and the German response to it were
1 Un Livre noir (Paris, 1922-34), vol. 1, p. 323; R. Poincare, op. cit. vol. 11, pp. 200 ff.,
34°ff-
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
uncertain. Far from seeking to chastise the Serbs, the Austrian Foreign
Minister Berchtold at first took the lead in diplomacy to ward off the
crisis. He proposed joint admonitions to the Turkish government in
favour of provincial decentralisation and warnings to the Balkan govern-
ments to keep the peace. German anxiety at this unilateral action was
more an affirmation of the exclusiveness and solidarity of the alliance than
the reverse. 1 And ultimately Berchtold’s plan, with the added warning
that the powers would not license changes in the territorial status quo,
was accepted, the two most interested powers, Austria and Russia, being
charged with acting on behalf of all. This promising concert of Europe
had depended above all on Sazonov’s revulsion at the apparition of
Balkan nationalism which he had so casually invoked. It was both tem-
porary and futile. The powers’ joint action coincided with Montenegro’s
declaration of war on Turkey on 8 October and this was followed by
Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek intervention ten days later, all without the
Russian licence which the Slav states’ mutual engagements contemplated.
The first crucial question which the war brought up was that of the
Sanjak of Novibazar, which Austria had occupied until 1909, which was
weakly held by the Turks and which the Serbs had to invade in order to
join up with the Montenegrins. This challenge to Austrian prestige and
strategic control Berchtold declined in advance, counting on later re-
establishment of the status quo 2 but against the general staff’s advice.
No guarantee from Germany against Russian intervention if the Serbs
were to be ejected was asked for, and that in spite of some evidence that
it would have been given if asked. 3
The main reason for the attachment of all the great powers to the status
quo in the first diplomatic phase of the Balkan crisis was uncertainty as to
who would win in a shooting war. The first few days of hostilities removed
all doubts. The Bulgars drove through Thrace towards the Straits, and were
just forestalled in Salonika by the Greeks. Meanwhile the Serbs reached
the Adriatic. The Bulgars were stopped by Turkish resistance outside
Constantinople, but their advance was unwelcome to the Russians. The
Serbian successes threatened only the Austrians. At this point, therefore,
Russian official policy and Panslav sentiment began to coalesce in spon-
sorship of the Serbs, while in Vienna an old idea was revived of building
up Bulgaria as the rival Balkan nation in disgrace with St Petersburg.
Recent historians have entertained perhaps too easily the possibility
for Austria of a reconciliation with the Serbs. 4 There was indeed a
1 Kiderlen to Bethmann-Hollweg, 2 September 1912. Die Grosse Politik, vol. xxxin,
no. 12,135.
s L. Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914 (Eng. ed. I. M. Massey, London, 1 952-7),
vol. 1, p. 387.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik , 1908-1914 (Vienna, 1930), vol. iv, no. 4,022.
4 For example, E. Eyck, Das personliche Regiment Wilhelms II (Zurich, 1948), p. 643;
Albertini, op. cit. vol. 1, pp. 394-5; A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, p.491.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
‘trialist’ school of thought which favoured equalising the status of the
Slavs inside the empire with that of the Germans and Magyars. Such a
move the Serbian government were believed to be ready to welcome if
only Austria would tolerate their acquisition of an Adriatic port. 1 But,
although overtures were made in the autumn of 1912 and again a year
later, their sincerity must be suspect considering the secret influence in
Serbia of nationalist extremists who had no use for compromise.
In their determination to keep the Serbs away from the Adriatic, the
Austrians used the principle of nationality in persuading the powers to
create the state of Albania. This block of non-Slav people, formerly under
Turkish rule, covered the whole coastline from Montenegro to Greece
but the Russian government pressed the Serb case for a free port on the
coast, in particular Durazzo, if not a corridor to it as well. Tension be-
tween the two great powers rose to the pitch of reinforcing covering troops
on both sides of the Galician frontier, a mutual demonstration which was
to last for months. There was no demand from Vienna nor refusal from
Berlin of support for intervention against the Serbs who had overrun part
of Albania: sufficient German encouragement to maintain the war of
nerves was gratuitous. The kaiser’s utterances were, as usual, both in-
consistent and emphatic. But Bethmann declared in a Reichstag speech
on 2 December that ‘if Austria in the course of securing her vital interests
. . .is attacked by Russia’ Germany would fight. 2
The Russian sponsorship of Serbian claims, however, was largely bluff.
As early as 9 November the Serbs had been warned not to count on Rus-
sian support. 3 But Panslav feeling was running high in Russia, with
militant devotees among the grand dukes and the general staff, so the
Serb cause could not be brusquely abandoned. As it was, the suspicion
of Russian apathy disconcerted Poincare, and he complained to Isvolsky
that Austrian military preparations were not being adequately countered. 4
Behind this seems to have been a conviction that Europe was near war,
and that if Russia was not ready to draw off German as well as Austrian
forces France would have to bear the brunt. Implicit, surely, was the new
interpretation of the casus foederis for France which Poincare had given
in St Petersburg and Isvolsky maintained that he had since confirmed.®
The victorious Balkan allies and the defeated Turks concluded an
armistice on 3 December and a peace conference opened in London.
At the same time a conference of ambassadors of the great powers was
formed there to supervise a Balkan and Aegean settlement. It immediately
agreed on the status of Albania and the exclusion of the Serbs from the
Adriatic — a decision followed by the Austrian renunciation of Novibazar.
1 Oesterreich-Ungams Aussenpolitik, vol. v, no. 5,005.
2 Eyck, Das personliche Regiment Wilhelms II, p. 639.
2 Siebert, Diplomatische Aktenstiicke zur Geschichte der Ententepolitik , p. 577.
4 Un Livre noir, vol. 1, p. 369. ‘ Ibid. p. 326.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF 1914
T his conference reflected the disposition of the great powers to agree,
and the issues between them were not directly affected by the break-up
of the Balkan peace conference or by the resumption of the conflict as
the so-called ‘Second Balkan War’. What mattered was the incompati-
bility of Serbian victory and expansion with the prestige and therefore
security of the Habsburg empire, and so, after the creation of Albania,
the question of its future frontiers now overrun by the Serbs and Monte-
negrins became crucial between the Austrian and Russian governments.
Where Austria-Hungary must stand and risk a general war Berchtold
had certainly not decided in advance but the German Chancellor com-
plained on 10 February that he was being kept in the dark. Indeed, at
this time both Bethmann and Moltke were working to moderate Austrian
policy. 1 Bethmann observed prophetically that it was ‘almost impossible
for Russia to look on inactive in case of a military operation by Austria-
Hungary against Serbia’. It was not until six weeks later that the ambas-
sadors’ conference registered an Austrian concession over the disputed
frontier villages of Dibra and Djakova, but relaxation of tension mean-
while between Vienna and St Petersburg and the stand-down of troops
in Galicia are attributable to the German attitude.
That the Germans were blowing hot and cold was, however, shown in
the Scutari crisis which followed in April 1913. That town, still held by the
Turks and allotted by the powers to the new Albania, was invested in turn
by the Serbs, who retired on Russian instructions, and by the Monte-
negrins under their king Nicholas (Nikita), who did not. A warning from
the Austrian government that if the London powers did not jointly
secure Nikita’s withdrawal they would take independent military action
was not discouraged in Berlin, and the Germans warned the French
explicitly that if Russia intervened Germany would fight. Meanwhile
Sazonov’s actions had been at least as pacific as were Bethmann’s in the
preceding crisis, and he had admonished the Montenegrins for their
‘passionate and foolish attitude’, in opposition to the ‘supreme interests
of European peace’. 2 But no one believed that Panslav sentiment would
allow Russia to abandon the Montenegrins, and the apparent danger of
war was only averted by King Nikita’s sudden submission. He is said to
have gambled on the Vienna bourse over the crisis so that he could take his
profit on ending it.
The Scutari episode held lessons. By the vicious conventions of twen-
tieth-century politics and publicity the evacuation of Scutari without
Austrian military action was to be regarded as a humiliation for the empire.
So domestic criticism of Berchtold as a weak Russophil disposed him to
more desperate courses, even if this was not immediately apparent.
After the settlement of the Scutari problem the Balkan belligerents were
1 Die Grosse Politik, vol. xxxrv(i), nos. 12,818, 12,824.
8 Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, vol. 1, p. 446.
12 147 NCUI2
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
brought back to London to negotiate, and their delegates finally signed
the Treaty of London on 30 May. This reduced European Turkey to a
bare hinterland of Constantinople and the Straits, the exact demarcation
of the Greek and Bulgarian shores of the Aegean coast being entrusted
to the great powers as was the disposition of the Aegean islands, while
the partition of Macedonia was left to Serbia and Bulgaria to negotiate.
It was when these two states fell out that Berchtold returned to the plan
of building up Bulgaria so as to encircle Serbia. Such an idea was un-
popular in Berlin, above all because Rumania, the nominal satellite of
the Triple Alliance, was also a rival of Bulgaria. Yet, in spite of her
Hohenzollem King Carol, Rumania could not in the long run be held
to the alliance. The intelligentsia were Francophil and the nationalist
public of all classes saw their enemy in Hungary with its minority of
a million or more Rumanians in the province of Transylvania. This
the Germans failed to appreciate. After the ill-judged Bulgarian surprise
attack on the Serbs and Greeks they maintained their objections to
Austrian intervention to save the aggressor. It was expected, even by
the bellicose Austrian chief of staff, General Conrad von Hoetzendorff,
that Austrian action would bring in Russia, and it is doubtful how far
Berchtold’s warlike plans represented serious intentions. But, when Greece,
Turkey and finally Rumania joined Serbia, the Germans disavowed their
ally’s policy by publicly approving the Treaty of Bucharest of 1 1 August
1913 and trying to incite the press to work for Berchtold’s removal. 1
Nor was this all. This treaty and the Treaty of London left over certain
questions for decision by the powers, and when the aspirations of Bulgaria
and Greece conflicted the kaiser placed Germany in the opposite camp
to the Austrians. 2 The latter found themselves in the same side as the
Russians, whose immediate concern was to stop the Greeks from creeping
up the coast towards Constantinople.
It was not until the autumn of 1913 that Berchtold won his first clear-
cut diplomatic victory over the Serbs with German support. The Serbs
were slow in withdrawing troops from northern Albania and indiscreetly
avowed their hope of obtaining a frontier rectification. Cumulative
warnings from Vienna were inadequate and were disregarded before the
ultimatum of 18 October, which gave the Serbs a week to retire. The
Germans were only informed of the note at the last moment (and the
Italians after its dispatch). But the kaiser was enthusiastic. He even depre-
cated a peaceful solution, pointing out to General Conrad, ‘The other
[powers] are not prepared.’ 3 This was true, since the last Austrian warning
before the ultimatum had caused both Sazonov and the French to tell
1 Die Grosse Politik, vol. xxxvi(i), no. 13,781, where the kaiser declared this aim.
2 Wilhelm’s philhellenic sympathies and his personal dislike of the king of Bulgaria
worked in the same direction.
2 Conrad von Hoetzendorff, A us meiner Dienstzeit (Vienna, 1922-5), vol. in, p. 470.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
the Serbs to back down. The Serbs did so at once, but most striking about
the success of Berchtold’s undertaking was the appeal of the virtual fait
accompli to the German government, in particular to the kaiser. It was
as if consultation was really unwelcome, as if the principle was being
established that Austria was responsible, morally and strategically, for
her own Balkan policy and Germany only for its consequences.
The truth was that, apart from such an opportunist support of Austria-
Hungary in a preventive war against ‘Slavdom and Gaul’, which the
kaiser regarded as inevitable, no official German political strategy and
certainly no clear war aims existed. 1 The kaiser was too volatile and yet
fundamentally too conservative a European. Characteristic was his
dictum that ‘ the true interests of Europe can be defended by the two main
powers in the [two] groups, standing shoulder to shoulder, namely
Germany and England’. 2 In world politics the ‘yellow peril’ interested
him more than competition with Britain and he scoffed at what he called
the ‘crazy vision of an African colonial empire’. 3 Nor was the Drang nach
Osten, the ‘urge to the East’, supposedly revealed in the Baghdad railway,
by any means a dominant official preoccupation. German policy during
the Balkan wars had not been appreciably affected by the German associa-
tion with the equipment and training of the Turkish army since the 1880s,
nor by the exploitation of this for diplomatic prestige in Turkey by
Marschall von Bieberstein. The railway project was held up by booming
Germany’s shortage of liquid capital ; military patronage was distinct, often
competitive and not wholehearted because no one knew until after the
outbreak of war in 1914 which great power camp the Turks would join. 4
Not only Germany’s but the other great powers’ commitments in the
decrepit Turkish empire were tested at the end of 1913. A new and large
German military mission was invited to Turkey to rehabilitate the army
once again. The news that a German general, Liman von Sanders, was to
command the Constantinople army corps, as well as lead the mission,
came in November as a shock to the Russians — perhaps a calculated one.
In St Petersburg it seemed time to consider again the ultimate issues of
war and peace in the question of the Straits. By January Sazonov was
prepared to face general European complications in order to induce the
Turks to drop Liman, and he proposed the occupation by all three entente
1 The question of war aims (and by implication ‘war guilt’) has recently been revived by
F. Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Dusseldorf, 1961) and in subsequent controversy,
especially the same author’s article, ' Weltpolitik, Weltmachtstreben und deutsche Kriegsziele ’
in the Historische Zeitschrift , vol. 199 (October 1964). His basis is the formulation of aims
in the first month of war, the rest is largely retropolation, the association of politicians and
officials with pre-war strategic and commercial collision courses which war-time peace
aims expressed. The mapping of these courses by Hallgarten (op. cit. p. 329) is, however,
filled in by Fischer’s study of the Potsdam archives. A recent (1967) presentation of the
controversy is in E. Lynar, Deutsche Kriegziele 1914-1918.
2 Die Grosse Politik , vol. xxxvi(i), no. 13,781. 3 Ibid. vol. xxxi, no. 11,422.
4 Fischer, H. Z., vol. 199 (see note 1 above).
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
powers of selected points in Asia Minor . 1 But it was already obvious that
he could not count on such co-operation. The French had been prepared
to protest to the Turkish government against ‘handing the keys of the
Straits’ to the Germans , 2 but the British could not even go so far as
that when they realised that their own adviser to the Turkish navy.
Admiral Limpus, held an equivalent naval command to Liman’s military
one. In any case they feared an accommodation at their expense between
St Petersburg and Berlin as more likely than a war . 3 But the immediate in-
terest of Germany in a partition was overestimated in London. The Germans
had designs on Turkish territory but were not ready for annexation. They
wished, more than the Russians, to postpone the moment of partition . 4
In the event a conciliatory solution was found in Berlin by promoting
Liman to a rank which put him above a corps commander in Turkey and
thus left him as adviser only. This concession overtook a ministerial
conference at St Petersburg in January which was devoted to the emer-
gency. There the Minister for War, Sukhomlinov, claimed that Russia was
‘perfectly ready for a duel with Germany’ if necessary, although the
general staff was counting, with Sazonov, on French and possibly even
on British support. The conclusion of the conference against risking war
without both ‘entente’ partners deferred to the opposition of the premier,
Kokovtsov — but Kokovtsov was about to leave office because of his
incompatibility with the court regime.
The Liman episode had two serious consequences affecting the balance
of war and peace six months later. There was a reappraisal of Russian
strategy and armaments, and there was the emergence of a new and omi-
nous ill-feeling in Russo-German public relations. Second thoughts made
the Russian general staff conclude that an offensive in the Straits would
have been impracticable, and led to fresh appropriations for the Black Sea
fleet, the retention of conscripts with the colours and vigorous publicity
for rearmament . 5 This was taken as provocation by German official and
public opinion and set off a newspaper war probably stimulated by both
governments. Soon the Allies, Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser degree
France, were drawn into a ‘controversy which could hardly be more
embittered’, as the British Ambassador wrote from Vienna, ‘if a war were
on the point of breaking out ’. 6
1 Memorandum of 6 January summarised in Der grossen Katastrophe entgegen (Berlin,
1929) by Baron M. Taube (who was Sazonov’s assistant), p 291.
2 Documents diplomatiques frangais, 1871-1914, 3 eme serie, vol. vra, no. 544. The French
documents do not support the contention of E. Brandenburg ( From Bismarck to the World
War, Oxford, 1927, p. 461) and other German apologists that France was encouraging
Russian belligerency (ibid. vol. vm, nos. 598, 689, 694).
2 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (London, 1926-38), vol. x (i),
no. 180.
4 Jagow to the German Ambassador in Constantinople in July 1 91 3 (Brandenburg, p. 459).
6 M. N. Pokrovskii, Drei Konferenzen zu Vrorgeschichte des Krieges (Berlin, 1920), pp. 66-7.
* British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. x(ii), no. 526.
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The newspaper campaign in Russia linked Russian preparedness with
admonitions to France. Russian public and official opinion was particu-
larly anxious for the maintenance in France of the new law for three years’
military service. The law had been passed in the spring of 1913, virtually
simultaneously with the last great army expansion in Germany. Neither
measure seems to have been definitely provoked by the other, but in each
case the opportune competition reduced domestic criticism. Three years’
service in France was the only way of making up for Germany’s 50 per
cent advantage in population and its higher birth-rate. The parties of the
left were against it, but the premier in 1914, Viviani, had promised Poin-
care to leave the law intact. Such a party compromise reflected the deeper
tension in French than in Russian relations with Germany, even if the
French press was more discreet. Exhibitions of German militarism,
especially in Alsace or Lorraine, were given ominous importance. In
both France and Germany parties of the left deplored the tension and an
inter-parliamentary conference met at Berne in 1913 as a demonstration
against nationalist alignments. Events proved its superficiality as well as
frustrating its second annual meeting.
Britain was not remote from these agitations. The alarms in Russia
led to pressure on Britain to tighten its links in the Triple Entente. The
British royal visit to Paris in April stimulated French advocacy of the
Russian plea and Grey gave way to the extent of linking the communica-
tion to the Russian ambassador of the Anglo-French agreement of 1912
with a move towards Anglo-Russian naval staff talks. The Germans got
wind of this and were barely placated by Grey’s prevaricatory answer to
a parliamentary question to the effect that no agreements existed which
would hamper Britain’s free choice whether to wage war or not. They
knew the facts, or an optimistic Russian interpretation of them, from pur-
loined Russian documents. 1 Meanwhile the direct Anglo-German negotia-
tions on extra-European issues, to which Berlin had probably attached too
general a political significance, approached their conclusion. By the end
of July no obstacle remained to the signature of the agreement for the
hypothetical partition of the colonies of Britain’s Portuguese ally. On
27 July the kaiser authorised the signature of the Baghdad railway treaty
which exchanged British control of the Persian Gulf shipping for German
control of the line to the Basra railhead. Linked with this treaty, and at
least equally significant, had been a series of semi-private, semi-govern-
mental tripartite negotiations in which the Turks shared, over oil and
shipping interests — which were producing the incongruous result of the
two rival imperial navies relying on the same local source of fuel.
The diplomatic stabilisation in the Near East and Africa — with its Far
1 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. x(ii), no. 548. E. Zechlin,
Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. 199 (1964), suggests that the effect of this incident in Anglo-German
relations was far-reaching; see especially p. 352, footnote 2.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
Eastern parallel in the partition between Russia and Japan of claims on
China beyond the wall — had no bearing on European antagonisms unless
to free the protagonists entirely from other preoccupations. Contem-
poraries were in little doubt about the two crucial European factors:
first the ripeness of the Habsburg empire for dissolution — or its converse
the expansive force of Yugoslavism — and second the preponderance of the
German army for good or ill. Jagow, the German Secretary of State,
compared the prospects of Austria and Turkey in terms of ‘ a race between
the two empires, which goes to pieces first’ and deplored the lack of
imperial sense among German Austrians. 1 Tschirschky, in Vienna, fore-
saw the latter joining Germany as the result of an eventual partition, and
asked ‘ whether it really pays us to bind ourselves so tightly to this phan-
tom of a state’. 2 Yet the Germans had little patience for the symptoms or
the fancy remedies of the dying empire. They regarded the coming threat
of the union of Serbia and Montenegro as irresistible, they deprecated
a connection with Bulgaria and they continued to urge the conciliation of
Rumania until that country’s final defection was manifested by a Russian
imperial visit in June 1914. 3
That German military dominance obstructed the natural course of
Slav liberation was not the sole grudge against it even of Russia. It
was intolerable in itself. Sazonov’s words are revealing. ‘To feel the
stronger and yet to give way to an opponent whose superiority consists
solely in his organisation and discipline’ was ‘humiliating’ and led to
‘demoralisation’. 4 It was not known how unsystematic and — to give
it its due— negative German foreign policy was behind its weapons.
Alarmists could point to the domestic and foreign best-seller, Germany and
the Next War, by the military publicist General Bernhardi, which de-
manded a final subjugation of France and revived Treitschke’s aspersions
on the ‘unseemliness’ ( Unsittlichkeit ) of world peace. And in fact, though
not to public knowledge, these views sometimes echoed in the kaiser’s
mind, with a possible influence in official quarters, as when he wrote in
1 9 1 2 of the ‘ eunuch-like ’ tendency to ‘ emphasise world peace ’ . 5 The temper
of Europe was described in famous words by Colonel House, the American
president’s personal envoy on a peace-making mission whose very existence
was significant enough. ‘The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism
run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different
understanding there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. There is too
much hatred, too many jealousies.’ There was also, in spite of the German
army, too much incompatible confidence among the general staffs — that
built-in error of generals promoted for their leadership, not in counsel
1 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914. vol x (ii), no. 532.
2 Die Grosse Politik, vol. xxxix, no. 15,734.
8 Oesterreich-Ungams Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, 9,902.
4 Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya v Epokhu Imperiaiizma, series iii (1931), vol. 1, no. 289.
5 Die Grosse Politik, vol. xxxm, no. 12,225.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
but in battle (or manoeuvres) where euphoria is an indispensable virtue.
They were not interested in deterrents but in victories.
While the tsar was driving in an outpost of the Triple Alliance on his
visit to the king of Rumania, the kaiser was conferring with the Archduke
Francis Ferdinand on Austro-Hungarian and Balkan problems at the
latter’s residence in Bohemia. Barely a fortnight later these issues were
given a tragic twist by the assassination on 28 June of the archduke
and his morganatic wife by a Bosnian Serb of Austro-Hungarian nation-
ality, Gavrilo Princip. The murder was planned from Belgrade by the
Serbian secret society Crna Ruka (the Black Hand) because Francis
Ferdinand stood for Habsburg federalism and this threatened the estab-
lishment of a greater Yugoslavia. The young assassins declared this motive
at their trial as a private one, 1 and the Austro-Hungarian government did
not realise the scope of the organisation behind them. Still less did they
know that its leader was Dimitrievic, alias Apis, and that he was simul-
taneously head of the Black Hand and of military intelligence at the
Serbian war office. Although Apis and his agents were in the Russians’
pay it is highly improbable that this particular operation was helped by
them or known at any level. 2 The case against the Serbian government
rested upon the general licence, indeed encouragement, given to irre-
dentist nationalism and the alleged supply of arms to terrorists by Serbian
officials in the Narodna Odbrana (National Defence), an open patriotic
association which the Austrians confused with the secret Black Hand.
Austrian police intelligence was in fact as poor as their police precautions
and the failure of these must be held to weaken their case against the
Serbs. What remains uncertain is how much the Pa§ic government in
Serbia knew of the Black Hand’s plans and, if complicit, whether they
were acquiescent or intimidated. It is fairly certain that they warned
Vienna but too cautiously to be heeded.
The problem of war and peace set by the Sarajevo murder did not differ
essentially from the emergencies in previous years when the Austro-
Hungarian government had forgone the temptation of a casus belli against
the South Slavs because of the risk of Russian intervention and the un-
certainty of German counter-support. General Conrad thought the oppor-
tunity less favourable than earlier ones, while resolving that it must not
be missed. 3 The gamble appealed to the court’s and the bureaucracy’s
mood of studied desperation. By 1 July official opinion in favour of war
was general enough for Tisza to protest to the emperor, after a ministerial
council at which he was the sole dissentient, against the ‘fatal blunder’, 4
as he saw it, of using Berchtold’s inadequate casus belli. But this time
1 A. Mousset, Un Drame historique, l' attentat de Sarajevo (Paris, 1930) (text of interroga-
tions), p. 151.
* N. P. Poletika, Vozniknovenie pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1964), pp. 236-40.
* Conrad, A us meiner Dienstzeit, vol. IV, p. 72.
4 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik- vol. vm, no. 9,978.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
there was to be no mistake about German co-operation. A special mission
was sent off to Berlin to sound out the senior partner in the Triple Alliance.
The message to the German kaiser which Count Hoyos presented on
5 July consisted of a letter from Francis Joseph covering a general memo-
randum on Austrian Balkan policy. This re-stated the Austrian plan of
winning over Bulgaria as an ally against Serbia and a check upon the
defection of Rumania, and warned that it was against Germany that
Russian intrusion in the Balkans was really aimed. Neither document
explicitly proposed immediate action, still less did they contain a plan
for this, but the letter declared that future policy must be based on the
‘isolation and reduction of Serbia’ 1 and counted on the kaiser’s agreeing
that the ‘focus of criminal agitation in Belgrade must not survive un-
punished’.
Hoyos and the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Szogyeny found the
kaiser in a receptive frame of mind, indignant at an act of regicide whose
victim was a personal friend, yet impatient to dispose of urgent business
so that he could leave the next day for his annual cruise with the German
fleet. He hastened to give his concurrence in Austrian intentions subject
to the formality of consultation with the Imperial Chancellor. Szogyeny
was able to telegraph at once that German support was promised even
if it should come to war with Russia and that if the Ballplatz saw the
‘necessity of military action against Serbia’ the kaiser would regret to
see them miss ‘the present favourable moment’. 2 Before joining his yacht
on 6 July the kaiser conferred briefly with representatives of the army and
navy staff's — Moltke and Tirpitz were away. He warned them of the
possible contingency of war with Russia and consequently with France
as well, but he did not think Russia was ‘ready to fight’ and he did not
apparently discuss Great Britain’s position at all.
Consultation between the kaiser and the Imperial Chancellor, who
arrived in Potsdam after the Austrians, was equally perfunctory ; historians
have long ago dissolved the myth of a full dress ‘crown council’ approving
a war plan. 3 The result, according to Szogyeny, was a confirmation of his
master’s undertakings by the Chancellor, in whose opinion, likewise, the
present moment was most favourable for ‘ immediate action ’ [Einschreiteri]
against Serbia as the most radical and best solution. 4 The difference be-
tween his report of the Chancellor’s assurances and Bethmann-Hollweg’s
own account in telegraphing to Tschirschky does not lead very far. Beth-
mann-Hollweg’s telegram recorded the kaiser’s agreement with the general
Balkan policy proposed by Vienna — in which, as regards Bulgaria and
Rumania, the Germans proceeded to co-operate — and added that as re-
gards the ‘ questions at issue with Serbia ’ the kaiser ‘ would take up no
1 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 9,984. * Ibid. no. 10,058.
s S. B. Fay, The Coming of the World War (1936 ed.), vol. 11, p. 181.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 10,076.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I9I4
position since they extended outside his competence V But he would ‘ stand
loyally on the side of Austria-Hungary’.
The claim on behalf of Bethmann that this lack of explicitness implied
reservations has to contend with the fact that no positive hint, even in
favour of moderation, was given to Vienna until nearly three weeks later,
when the scope of diplomacy to prevent the outbreak of war was being
narrowed by military policy solely concerned with its most advantageous
timing. Meanwhile Tschirschky’s interpretation of his instructions, press-
ing upon Germany’s ally both a free hand and an unconditional guaran-
tee, was continuously encouraged. In this neither the Chancellor nor the
kaiser was deliberately picking a quarrel among the great powers: rather
they were approving a supposedly unequal contest between one great and
one minor power which they calculated could be localised. As to the
consequences of miscalculation they showed themselves recklessly in-
different. The alignment of their potential enemies received no serious
political and strategic appreciation. The charge of ‘imposing’ war,
attributed to Germany in the Versailles treaty, was therefore miscon-
ceived. It was levity rather than a grand design which produced the fatal
commitment. Where deliberation entered was in treating the commitment
to Austria as more rigid than it necessarily was, and in making a virtue of
preventive war against Russia and France out of the arguable necessity
of ensuring an Austrian political victory over Serbia.
Armed with the encouraging German response, Berchtold obtained from
a ministerial council on 7 July a decision in favour of provoking the Serbs
to war in preference to exacting their diplomatic humiliation. 2 He argued
that the Germans would see any sort of bargain as a ‘confession of weak-
ness which could not fail to react on our position in the Triple Alliance
and the future policy of Germany’. This view was strengthened by
Szogy£ny’s reports of Berlin’s impatience and of the opinion prevailing
there that Russia was preparing for a future aggressive war, but was not
yet ready for a defensive one.
Meanwhile a plan of action was taking shape. Tschirschky could report
to Berlin on 10 July that a 48-hour ultimatum was to be delivered in
Belgrade and that it would be for Berchtold a ‘very disagreeable’ solution
if it were accepted. 3 But the Germans refused to help formulate the de-
mands. They rejected responsibility for the form of the diplomatic opera-
tion while accepting its consequences. What the Germans did want was
to speed up Austrian preparations, while foreign apprehensions were lulled
by such deceptions as keeping both countries’ chiefs of staff on leave.
The Austrian timing of the ultimatum for 23 July was explained to Berlin
as necessitated by the state visit to St Petersburg of Poincare and Viviani
1 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch (Charlottenburg, 1919), vol. 1, no. 15.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolilik, vol. vm, no. 10, 1 18.
* Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, no. 29.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
between the 16th and 22nd of the month. It was better to wait till the
French had gone home. But to Conrad Berchtold explained the delay by
the need of getting in the harvest before mobilising, and by the process
of investigation into the murder, as well as by the diplomatic problem. 1
The preparation of the case against Serbia was not plain sailing; the
investigator sent to Sarajevo by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could
report no proof of even indirect responsibility, still less official complicity. 2
Nevertheless the terms of an ultimatum were drafted by 19 July and
approved by a ministerial council and by the emperor, so that the text
could be sent off on the following day, for communication to the powers
after delivery of the note in Belgrade in the evening of 23 July. Its tenor had,
of course, been known in Berlin for several days, but the Germans’
interest in foreknowledge of the actual text seems to have been only in
order to prepare the press.® The Secretary of State, Jagow, claimed that
he criticised its severity to the Austrian Ambassador, but twenty-four
hours after its receipt he was telegraphing to the major German embassies
that he had no knowledge of its contents. 4 It was the predetermined
German policy to turn a blind eye to the terms of the ultimatum.
The degree of collusion up to this stage between the two central powers
is registered by a report from Schoen, the Bavarian representative in
Berlin, on an interview with the Under-Secretary of State, Zimmermann,
which he sent to Munich on 18 July. Schoen predicted the terms of the
Austrian ultimatum, recorded the complete full powers ( Blankovollmacht )
given to Austria, and explained how the Germans, when giving immediate
diplomatic support to the Austrian case, ‘will claim to be as much sur-
prised by the Austrian action as the other powers’. 6 Germany wanted the
conflict localised, and hoped that Russian oppositionmight be no more than
bluff, and that France and Britain might urge prudence in St Petersburg,
but Schoen’s information showed that even British neutrality was not
expected if the balance of power appeared to be jeopardised by a threat
to the existence of France. A still more authoritative explanation of the
motives of German policy was given in a private letter from Jagow to
Lichnowsky, who had been criticising from London the submission of
German policy to Austrian interests. Arguing that Austria, Germany’s
only available ally, needed to chasten Serbia if she was to achieve ‘ political
rehabilitation’ and if ‘the stabilisation of Russian hegemony in the Bal-
kans’, which he described as ‘inadmissible’, was to be averted, Jagow
1 Conrad, A us meiner Dienstzeit, vol. iv, p. 72.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 10,252.
3 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, no. 83.
* Jagow, Ursachen des Weltkriegs, p. I io. Bethmann-Hollweg also recollected his and
Jagow’s misgivings ( Betrachtungen zum Weltkriege, vol. 1, p. 1 39). These vital facts were
in effect misrepresented by no less a scholar than Gerhard Ritter ( Staatskurst und Kriegs-
handwerk, vol. 11, p. 312) (who even got his dates wrong).
6 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. iv, Anhang IV.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
expressed hopes of localising the conflict. But, although he did not want a
‘ preventive war it was a better moment for a show-down with Russia than
it would be a few years hence. ‘Then she [Russia] will overwhelm us with
the number of her soldiers, then she will have built her Baltic fleet and her
strategic railways. Meanwhile our group will become weaker all the time.’ 1
This was the Austro-German commitment at the beginning of the
fourth week of July. Was it to any degree induced or confirmed by faults
of commission or omission on what became the other side? Apologists
for the central powers, while shuffling direct responsibility between Berlin
and Vienna, have found it extenuated by a provocative attitude on the
part of Belgrade, by the challenging consolidation of their front by the
French and Russians, and by a misleading posture of neutrality on the
part of Great Britain. There is some historical significance in all these
charges, whatever their polemical bearing. Contemporary reporting from
Serbia was partisan, but left no doubt that public opinion was excited ;
indeed an exchange of abuse with Austria had started in the press
directly after the Sarajevo crime. The government’s behaviour was, on the
whole, correct ; their offence was failure to initiate a Serbian investigation
into the backgound of the assassination concurrently with the Austrian
one. Coercion by the Black Hand or fear of damaging disclosures, rather
than deference to public opinion, may account for their tactless passivity.
But PaSic and his colleagues were showing no ardour for a sacrificial war
of national liberation, and their fear of its imminence culminated in
circular representations to the powers, protesting Serbian innocence and
willingness to give Austria reasonable satisfaction, although this step did
not effectively anticipate the Austrian ultimatum.
There is no evidence of Serbia having received any significant reassur-
ance or suasion from the Russians from the beginning of the crisis until
after the Austrian terms were announced. What mattered, however, was
not the independent Russian reaction to signs of Austrian preparations —
for these as we know were to be discounted as bluff in Vienna and Berlin
— but the development of Franco-Russian solidarity, and the arrival of
Poincare and Viviani in St Petersburg unquestionably coincided with an
increase in tension.
The French government had shown no more initiative in the Austro-
Serbian question during the first fortnight of July than the other Entente
powers, and on 15 July its leaders embarked on their planned visit to
Russia with an agenda for consultation in which Serbia had a low priority
compared, for instance, with the improvement of Anglo-Russian relations. 2
They were due to arrive on 20 July, to leave again on the 23rd and to be
back in Paris on 28 July. These dates were kept, and during all that crucial
period policy at the Quai d’Orsay was paralysed. So much is apparent
from the positive and negative evidence of the French documentary
1 Ibid. vol. I, no. 72. 2 Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, vol. n, p. 188.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
material, including Poincare’s own memoirs. But the paucity of informa-
tion about the Russian visit — which the published Russian documents
barely supplement — is hardly to be explained by a lack of activity. 1 There
can be no doubt that some immediate assurances were exchanged between
the allied leaders. On 2 1 July Sazonov for the first time told the German
Ambassador that Russia would not tolerate threats let alone military action
against Serbia, her policy being, so he said, ‘pacifique mais pas passive'. 1
This attitude was endorsed by Poincare himself on the same day in lec-
turing the Austrian Ambassador on the fact that ‘ Serbia has friends and
thereby a situation dangerous to peace may arise’. 3 Yet the only ostensibly
factual record of Franco-Russian agreement on joint policy during the
visit is provided by a telegram of 24 July from the British Ambassador.
Buchanan reported ‘a perfect community of views’ between France and
Russia on European problems, and ‘ a decision to take action at Vienna
with a view to the prevention of a demand for explanations or any sum-
mons equivalent to an intervention in the internal affairs of Serbia’. 4
No Franco-Russian counter-ultimatum in Vienna ensued, but the context
suggests the recognition by the French government of the defence of
Serbia’s independence as a casus foederis for France. Poincare’s personal
critics and revisionist historians have seized on the Russian visit as the
culmination of a conspiracy between the two military allies.
In contrast, the diplomacy of Great Britain has been blamed even at
this stage for an obtuse impartiality. 5 It is true that the German Ambas-
sador told Grey as early as 6 July of the probable Austrian action and even
of the possibility of German support. Lichnowsky’s warning was con-
firmed as regards Austria by the British Ambassador in Vienna, and even
the ‘egging on’ of Austria by Germany was detected by Crowe, the most
acute of Grey’s Foreign Office advisers, on 22 July. Yet on the same day
Grey could tell the French Ambassador: ‘ Probably Berlin was trying to
moderate Vienna.’® Although Grey impressed on both the Austrian and
German Ambassadors his mounting anxiety, he made no imputations.
And as late as 23 July he was speaking of a war between the other ‘four
great Powers’ with British neutrality consequently implied. 7
1 Documents diplomatiques franfais, 1871-1914 , 3 eme s6rie, vol. x, p. vi. P. Renouvin,
‘La Politique franchise en juillet 1914’ ( Revue de I'histoire de la guerre, janvier 1937
(pp. 1-2 1)).
* Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, no. 120.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vui, no. 10,461.
4 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. XI, no. 101.
6 See, for example, Albertini, op. cit. vol. n, pp. 214-16
* British Documents, vol. xi, no. 72.
7 Lichnowsky had been warned of much stronger language to Mensdorff though it was
to include an offer to support ‘moderate’ (gemassigt) demands in Belgrade. In reporting
this he added that Germany was counted on not to support the exploitation of the Sarajevo
murder for Austria’s Balkan ambitions— a caution which drew the kaiser’s comment: ‘An
enormity of British shamelessness ’ ( Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1,
no. 121).
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The hint of British neutrality was no doubt an avoidable mistake, and
Grey’s tendency to treat the German government as an uncommitted
power, only less impartial than Britain, was certainly due to intellectual
error as much as to a judgement of tactical expediency which subsequent
evidence of second thoughts in Berlin to some extent justified. But the
tendency has been to exaggerate and to antedate Grey’s opportunity of
influencing events. Whatever the defects of Grey’s analysis before Austria-
Hungary’s commitment was completed, it was unthinkable to counter the
latter by virtually guaranteeing Russia through France against Germany.
Such an improvisation on the consultative pact with France — which was
all the 1912 exchange of letters amounted to — would have required his
colleagues’ deliberate sanction. But there could be no question of seeking
this yet in a cabinet divided already over the Ulster crisis. On the other
hand, a private warning to Germany, without encouraging France and
Russia, would have been a doubtfully practicable bluff and alien to Grey’s
straightforward methods. And to encourage Britain’s Entente partners
on his own responsibility would have involved the risk of leading them to
‘face the ordeal of war relying on our support’ only to find that this was
not in the event forthcoming. 1 That risk could not be taken. If Grey did
not regard British intervention as a means of averting war it was because
his thinking was limited automatically by the realities of British politics. 2
The fact remains that German policy did not hang upon British non-
intervention. The German Foreign Office, as Schoen’s report shows,
expected British intervention if it was required to save France, while of
the two strategic doctrines in vogue in Germany one disbelieved in British
neutrality and the other disregarded the question. For the first of these,
Tirpitz’s blue water school, the world rivalry of the two naval, commercial
and imperial powers must be the primary motive in German policy.
Far from accepting war with Russia, Tirpitz would have had Germany
seek a rapprochement at Britain’s expense, for ‘ coute que coute we must
set the Whale against the Bear’. 3 Such a diplomatic revolution was also
favoured by German conservatives of a very different stamp and supported
by a strong pro-German faction at the court of St Petersburg. 4 The other
school of strategy, without predilections for Britain or Russia, was that
1 Grey, Twenty-Five Years (1935 ed.), vol. n, p. 158.
* It is a debating point rather than a historical one, since it did not enter into Grey’s
calculations, that an earlier British commitment, if it had not averted war, might well have
placed Grey among the principal accused in the war-guilt controversy. He might not have
been blamed for using war as an instrument of national policy but he would doubtless have
been blamed for encouraging the French and Russians to do so. Poletika (op. cit. p. 504)
finds Grey ‘striving to bring about war more quickly’. Side by side with a mastery of
familiar material this latest Soviet treatment shows striking ignorance of personalities and of
group and class interests in Europe at the time.
* Von Tirpitz, My Memoirs (English ed.), vol. 1, p. 174.
* This was a far less fanciful switch of policy than a tendency for France to combine
with Germany and Britain against Russia, which some historians have managed to discern:
for example A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, p. 514.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
of the Grand General Staff, which believed that the supremacy of Europe
would be settled in battle on the plains of Flanders and Poland. Their
timetable for the successive defeats of France and Russia did not leave
room for the unimaginable introduction of a full-sized British army, nor
for the long-term influence of sea power. Between these two schools the
kaiser had blundered for years, not fully aware of their contradictions;
but the policy of 5 July was that of the general staff.
The Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia was delivered in Belgrade
at 6.00 p.m. on 23 July and its acceptance was required within 48 hours.
The demands were formidable, but they were not disproportionate to the
allegations which introduced them — still less to the unknown truth
of Serbian intrigue. They included public repudiation of irredentist ambi-
tions and the dissolution of the Narodna Odbrana among other concessions
humiliating to Panslavism. 1 Russian susceptibilities were not acknow-
ledged but acceptance of the risk of war was confirmed in a telegram to
St Petersburg supplying the Austrian Ambassador Szapary with a brief
in support of the ultimatum. ‘If’, it began, ‘Russia judges the time ripe
for a final reckoning with the Central Powers the following instructions
will be superfluous.’ 2 This imputation ignored, of course, the common
assumption in both camps that Russia would not be ready until 1917. 3
But it owed nothing to the theory — since so popular — that war offered
tsarist Russia the last chance of national unity. Whether the revolutionary
movement in Russia and the big political strikes of the summer of 1914
influenced the tsar and his advisers is unknown. But on the evidence
Panslavism — the only vital political force favourable to the dynasty —
was not exploited.
When the Austrian terms reached Sazonov he is said to have exclaimed :
‘ This means a European war.’ 4 But in his interviews with the Austrian
and German Ambassadors there was no sign of fatalism, only indigna-
tion. To the German Ambassador Pourtales he gave the warning that
‘if Austria swallows Serbia we will make war on her’. 6 This produced a
deceptive reassurance, that Austria intended no annexation, which con-
cealed in fact a plan to feed Serbia to the other Balkan nations. The head-
less French government responded non-committally, but the Italians ob-
jected to ‘such far-reaching aggressive action’ without consultation. 6 It
already looked as if Italy would join the highest bidder or the most likely
winner after the first battles ; in Italy, as in Rumania, public opinion was
favourable not to her allies but to the Entente. Even Grey’s impartiality
1 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 10,395; vol. xi. Appendix A.
2 Ibid. no. 10,685.
3 The date set for a ‘general settlement’ according to the Serbian minister Jovanovid.
Albertini, op. cit. (Italian edition), vol. 1, facsimile letter facing p. 400.
4 Schilling, How the War Began in 1914 ( Diary of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
(London, 1925), p. 29.
5 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, nos. 1 60, 205.
6 Ibid. no. 156.
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did not flatter Austro-German hopes of ‘localising the dispute’. The
provocation given to Russia seemed to him too strong, and he appealed
for German action in Vienna as a part of four-power mediation. 1
The Russian reaction was not merely verbal. The Council of Ministers
approved a plan of partial mobilisation against Austria to be applied at
the appropriate moment. They also approved advice to the Serbs to
withdraw from Belgrade and throw themselves on the mercy of the great
powers. This has been interpreted as incitement to reject the Austrian
ultimatum, but the full argument depends on an arbitrary reconstruction
of missing correspondence. 2 And as late as 27 July the reply sent by the
tsar to a Serbian appeal was distinctly equivocal. Meanwhile Sazonov’s
indignation did not prevent him from asking the Austrians for an exten-
sion of the time limit. But the chief aim of Russian diplomacy at this
point was a British demonstration of solidarity with Russia and France.
When Buchanan reported Sazonov’s appeal for this, Crowe gave his
opinion that France and Russia had already decided to accept the Austrian
challenge so that the only question was whether Germany had determined
on war. He suggested a warning to Berlin if France or Russia began to
mobilise. But he failed to shake Grey’s conviction that the British public
would not sanction war over a Serbian quarrel. 3
Since the Serbian reply did not amount to unconditional acceptance of
the Austrian terms the Austrian Ambassador left Belgrade and the pre-
determined Austrian partial mobilisation — against Serbia only, not Rus-
sia— thereupon ensued. Actually the Serbs’ own mobilisation had just
preceded not only this but the delivery of their reply to the ultimatum,
which they thus took at its word. Yet the Serbian note was highly con-
ciliatory. About half the demands had been accepted outright, others
had been evasively but deferentially answered. Moreover, an offer to
submit the points left at issue to the international court at the Hague was
added. The kaiser rightly called this a ‘ brilliant achievement for a time
limit of only 48 hours’, but the Austrians, he thought, had scored ‘a great
moral success’ and ‘all grounds for war disappear’. This was the common
opinion in Europe, as the Austrians realised, but the powers were so
strategically divided that the prospects of conciliation were seen to be
poor. Pessimism aided the forces which were to justify it.
One proposal for conciliation had emerged already in the British plan
for a conference, accompanied by a standstill in operations. Grey was
influenced by gratifying recollections of the London conference of 1913,
but the situations were profoundly dissimilar. In the earlier Balkan crises
no great power had been an immediate party to the quarrel, nor had
the Austro-Hungarian government been either single-minded or fully
1 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. XI, nos. 99, 116.
* For example, in Albertini, op. cit. vol. n, pp. 353 ff.
* British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. xi, no. IOI.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
supported by Germany. The value of a conference in 1 9 14 would have been
to gain time for compromise. But the desire for compromise was not general
and each nation’s military planners were known to believe — incompatibly
with one another — that time was on the side of their adversary.
Although the German government agreed to four-power mediation in
principle, they rejected the conference proposal on the ground that for
Austria it would amount to a ‘court of arbitration’. 1 The French and
Italians accepted, but Sazonov announced his preference for direct talks
with the Austrians, to be met a day later by Berchtold’s refusal to discuss
Austrian relations with Serbia on the basis of the ultimatum and the reply.*
Next the British were told in Vienna that it was too late for mediation;
in fact, the declaration of war on 28 July was deliberately intended to
frustrate mediation. Berchtold said as much when asking the Emperor
Francis Joseph’s sanction two days earlier ; it seems that the urging towards
a fait accompli came from the German general staff. 3 In fact Austrian
military planners did not want active operations before 12 August, and
their bombardment of Belgrade was staged to end political measures
rather than to open their offensive.
This first declaration of war was not decisive. Russian-Austrian talks
continued, although Sazonov declared that they were manifestly futile. 4
German representations in Vienna were actually stimulated, but by this
time the unity of command over German policy was questionable. Most
serious was the effect on Russian preparations for war and hence on
German relations with Russia. So-called ‘premobilisation’, involving
some preliminary measures, had begun on 25 July both in Russia and
in Germany. This phase, by custom not regarded as hostile, played a
relatively small part in the rapid German process so that the far slower
Russians were greatly the gainers. News of the declaration of war
on Serbia raised, however, the question of active Russian ‘mobilisation’
(involving a call-up and all other measures towards operational readiness),
partial or total. The military arguments for the more radical course were
considered strong, and it was held that the chance of avoiding war was
so slight that to lose no time was the first consideration. Developments
during 29 July favoured these arguments, accepting the fallacy that the
Germans would ever let the Russians get a move ahead. Evidence that
there was some prospect of Austrian concessions was outweighed by news
of the bombardment of Belgrade and a separate German threat to
mobilise (fully) if Russia did not cease her minor military preparations. 5
1 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, vol. XI, no. 185.
8 Ibid. vol. 179, no. 198. Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya v Epokhu Imperializma, series iii,
vol. 5 (1934), nos. Ii6, 188.
3 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, nos. 10,855, 10,656; Die deutschen Doku-
mente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, nos. 21 3, 257.
4 British Documents, vol. XI, no. 258.
6 Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya v Epokhu Imperializma , series iii, vol. 5, no. 224.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
There had been the usual muddle in Berlin; the quasi-ultimatum which
Sazonov received from Pourtales did not correspond to what Bethmann
and Jagow were saying elsewhere. 1 But Sazonov was now convinced that
the attack on Belgrade showed that the Austrians had only been negotiat-
ing to gain time. 2 He was converted to general mobilisation and agreed to
persuade the reluctant tsar to sanction it. Recent reassurance of French
support may have aided the Russian government’s decision, but their
ally was in fact far from approving such impatience. 3
Hardly had the instructions for general mobilisation been approved
than they were cancelled at the tsar’s order and the partial mobilisation,
of which the powers had already been notified, substituted. This was the
result of a direct message from the kaiser to the tsar. The telegraphic
correspondence between the two imperial cousins belongs to the period
of second thoughts in Germany. Unfortunately the kaiser was too frantic
and inconsequent and the tsar too weak and fatalistic to control the
situation for good or evil. Until after he returned from his cruise the
kaiser’s influence had been wholly bellicose. But from the time he saw
the Serbian reply, which seems to have been deliberately kept from him,
the affectation of martial trenchancy and political infallibility in his com-
ments and instructions began to alternate with self-pity, even common
sense. It occurred to him that Austrian ‘honour’ might be satisfied by the
seizure of Belgrade. This harmonised with the support which Bethmann-
Hollweg had already begun to give the British move for mediation —
stimulated without doubt by the diminishing prospect of British neutrality
unless Germany could earn it. On the 27th Grey’s guarded words to the
German Ambassador about the scope of a European war caused Lich-
nowsky to warn Bethmann explicitly that ‘in case of war we would have
England against us ’,“ so that the British offer of pacification in St Peters-
burg in exchange for similar action in Vienna should be followed up.
Bethmann sent on Lichnowsky’s telegram to Vienna with his blessing.
His object was probably to lessen German responsibility in the eyes of the
world, but domestic politics also required that Germany should appear
‘forced into war’, as he explicitly stated. 6 Some saving clauses in his
instructions to Tschirschky, in particular that the Ambassador should
‘ carefully avoid giving the impression that we want to hold Austria back ’, 6
also suggest that he was less preoccupied with averting war than with
improving the grounds for waging it. Whatever Bethmann’s own position,
1 For example in British Documents, vol. xi, no. 263, and Die deutschen Dokumente sum
Kriegsausbruch, vol. n, no. 385.
* Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 11,003.
1 PoincarS, Au Service de la France, vol. rv, p. 385. The timing and meaning of assurances
from the dispersed French ministers before the warning on 30 July from Viviani in Paris
not to provoke German mobilisation is highly controversial. It is discussed exhaustively in
Albertini, vol. n, ch. xm.
* Die deutschen Dokumente sum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 1, no. 265.
‘ Ibid. vol. 1, no. 277. 6 Ibid. vol. n, no. 323.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
the increasingly strong remonstrances which he ordered in Vienna were
almost certainly rendered ineffective by the Secretary of State, Jagow,
as well as by Moltke. The Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin,
Szogyeny, reported on 28 July that the apparent German support for
British proposals for mediation was only formal and that the German
government were really ‘decisively against heeding them’. 1 Whether or
not Szogyeny overdid Jagow’s gloss on the Chancellor’s views, Berchtold
took him at his word and proceeded to treat the official German representa-
tions with calculated indifference. It is not known how faithfully
Tschirschky interpreted the Chancellor’s instructions, let alone his mood,
but Bethmann’s arguments and reproaches got merely evasive answers.
The Austrians had concluded that a prestige victory would be valueless
and that operations must go on.
Meanwhile the situation in Berlin had changed. Bethmann’s last and
most indignant telegram to Vienna was cancelled 2 and the kaiser’s support
in recommending the ‘halt in Belgrade’ to the Emperor Francis Joseph
was too feeble and came too late. 3 The Austrians had successfully tem-
porised long enough to let the mounting anxieties of the German general
staff at Russia’s military counter-preparations gain the ascendancy in
German policy. On 29 July that body had formally warned the Chancellor
of the decreasing lead in mobilisation which Germany would retain if
Russian and French preparations went on. Military intelligence about
these preparations overwhelmed Bethmann, late on 30 July, reinforced as
it was by an interruption of the kaiser’s pacific mood. For Wilhelm was
indignant and despondent at news from London discountenancing a
Hanoverian prince’s report to him that George V reckoned on British
neutrality. 4 Meanwhile Moltke hadalready been working against Bethmann
in messages to Conrad in Vienna. ‘Mobilise at once against Russia’, he
urged, ‘Germany will mobilise.’ 5 This injunction caused Berchtold to
remark: ‘Who gives the orders, Moltke or Bethmann?’ Only the lack of
co-ordination, indeed the division of power in Berlin, made it possible for
the dependent ally to rebuff formal representations in favour of com-
promise from the superior power. It says more for Bethmann’s loyalty
than his trustworthiness as a historical source that he did not use this
defence in his memoirs.
The impatience of the German generals on 30 July and the pressure they
exerted on Bethmann and Conrad is sufficiently explained by the Russian
measures of partial mobilisation; there is no need to assume a premonition
1 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 10,793.
2 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. n, nos. 44 1 and 450. It had included
the words: ‘If. . .Vienna rejects everything it will prove that it absolutely wants war. . .and
Russia will remain guiltless.’
3 DD 368, 374, 400, 452. 4 Ibid. no. 437.
6 Oesterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. vm, no. 11,033; Conrad, op. cit. vol. rv, pp.
152-3. Conrad’s quotation of his own correspondence does not of course possess complete
authenticity.
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of the general mobilisation on the following day. For the partial mobilisa-
tion was known to involve all but three of the empire’s call-up districts and
the military as well as political significance of the fact that those omitted
were the ones facing the German front was underrated. Still a decisive
German reaction was forestalled by the further Russian step of general
mobilisation, formally putting Russia in the wrong.
The Russian decision on 30 July, made public the next morning, was
taken on purely military grounds, the impracticability of partial mobilisa-
tion, and the belief that German general mobilisation was imminent.
The generals had pressed for the reversal of the tsar’s last order of the
previous day, and the weak and sanctimonious autocrat was driven against
his pacific and Germanophil inclinations by Sazonov’s advocacy into
his habitual refuge of fatalism. The French made a last-minute plea for
caution, but it is still not clear what bearing, if any, it had on the Russian
decision. The relevant telegram of 30 July, while confirming the alliance
obligations of France, suggested that Russia ‘should not immediately
proceed to any measure which might offer Germany a pretext for a total
or partial mobilisation of her forces’. 1 This must be accepted as sent
in good faith, but there are grounds for supposing that the warning was
passed on late, imperfectly or not at all by the French Ambassador
Paleologue, whose conduct throughout the crisis is suspect. 2 No such
cautionary advice came from London. Rightly or wrongly it remained
Grey’s conviction that he must not exert influence when he could not
accept responsibility for its indirect consequences.
The Russian general mobilisation was the decisive calamity. This is
true even given the excuse that it was merely forestalling German action
of the same kind. It is not certain that the Russian partial mobilisation
was in fact inducing a German counter-move yet, in spite of Moltke’s tele-
grams to Conrad. Moreover, Russian mobilisation was necessarily in-
effective, for any attempt to reduce the German lead in the ultimate phase
could be swiftly neutralised by Germany. Historians should not tolerate
the illusion of the contemporary strategists that rapid mobilisation was
all-important. Never has the dogma of the offensive been more prevalent;
never, because of the lead of firepower over tactical mobility, has that
dogma been less applicable.
Still, no one questioned in 1914 that general mobilisation by a great
power must be followed by hostilities. The position was too competitive
for the professionals to entertain the politicians’ pretence that the Russian
army could stay inactive on a war footing. The German government’s
immediate declaration of a state of war emergency ( Kriegsgefahrzustand )
on 31 July, followed by their ultimatum demanding the cessation of
1 Documents diplomatiques franca is, 1871-1914 , 3^me s6rie, vol. xi, no. 305.
2 This is the result of criticism of his evidence as much as the notoriety of his warlike
views. See Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, vol. n, pp. 618-19
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
Russian military preparations, constituted only technically the initiative
in aggression. But simultaneously they proceeded to extend their strategic
initiative to the extremes demanded by the so-called Schlieffen plan.
That was a different matter. The famous plan, on which training and
mobilisation had been based through twenty years of its evolution, from
Schlieffen to Moltke, envisaged a ‘lightning’ ( blitzschnell ) offensive to
knock out France before turning on Russia — which would be meanwhile
held by a German defensive campaign. Tactically, that involved an
approach march through Belgium to envelop the French left flank. 1 In
this war on two fronts the west had priority, so a collision with France
had to be brought on. Simultaneously therefore with the 12-hour ulti-
matum to Russia an 18-hour ultimatum went off for delivery in Paris
demanding an assurance of neutrality. A request for free passage through
Belgium had already been sent off for delivery in Brussels as soon as
operations against France were due to start. But operations were delayed,
for the French did not accept the initiative in declaring war. Had they
acceded to the demand for neutrality the German Ambassador was to
require further — so set was his government on the inevitability of a two-
front war — the temporary surrender of two frontier fortresses as a guaran-
tee. But when they neither promised neutrality nor declared war it was
considered in Berlin that a short postponement of the onslaught would be
just worth while in the hope of some French initiative or provocation
which might affect the British attitude. The Germans were not going to
compromise the Schlieffen plan for the sake of Great Britain; they had
no alternative war plan and the challenge to Britain as a guarantor of
Belgian neutrality must ensue. But whereas general war on the continent
was seen in virtually all quarters to be inevitable within a few days once
Russia and Austria had begun to mobilise, immediate British intervention
was not. It was not appreciated in France or Germany — perhaps not in
Britain itself — that Belgian neutrality rather than the fate and conduct of
France would be the crucial issue.
Since Grey’s admonitions on 27 July which had produced second
thoughts in Berlin, the development of British parliamentary and public
opinion had not kept pace with the requirements of effective diplomacy.
Nor had the views of the Cabinet. Though the Liberal press was con-
spicuously divided, the bulk of the Liberal party’s supporters were unpre-
pared for war. Pacifist, and isolationist, they inclined to believe that war
was financially impossible in the modem world as well as immoral, and
that Germany as a great commercial power must be predisposed to peace.
Did not Germany, furthermore, possess a powerful and internationally
minded socialist movement, and great trade unions opposed to militarism?
1 The incursion of the German armies into Holland as well had been dropped from the
original plan: it was to be restored in the most thorough, though differently phased, use of
the whole plan in 1940. G. Ritter, Der Schlieffenplan (Munich, 1956), gives its full history.
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THE APPROACH OF THE WAR OF I914
Many conservatives and most socialists also held one or other of these
illusions. Moreover, of the putative allies, Russia was the classic enemy
at once of the British Empire in Asia and of international socialism and
democracy, while sympathy for France was counteracted by suspicion
of her interest in a war of revenge.
These political inhibitions produced a schism in the Cabinet in the last
week of peace. In Churchill’s opinion the Cabinet would have ‘ broken up ’
if Grey had pushed ahead of events and sought authority for threats to
influence them. 1 Public opinion was to unite on the issue of Belgian
neutrality when it was nakedly presented by the Germans, but the Cabinet
would not have united upon it as a hypothetical casus belli a few days
earlier. How full and how early a commitment to intervention Grey
wanted to make is not known. Two things are however certain. First,
until the Russian general mobilisation order it was not ‘ too late ’ according
to the contemporary strategists’ conventions, even, for the Germans to have
insisted upon compromise in Vienna. This could have been achieved with
no more loss of face to Austria — indeed on more favourable terms — than
at an earlier stage. Secondly, there was sufficient evidence, well before the
Russian general mobilisation and without an explicit warning, for the Ger-
mans to reach the conclusion that Britain would intervene. That evidence
of British intentions had no effect on the diplomatic situation was due to the
fact that there was no more unity of command in Berlin than in London.
Grey did not press the Cabinet on the Belgian question; his limited
objective was a guarantee to protect the northern coasts of France against
the German fleet in view of the linked redistribution of French and British
naval units which had left the Channel ports undefended. Meanwhile,
confronted with the importunity of the French and German Ambassadors,
seeking respectively intervention and neutrality, his warnings to the
Germans were becoming a little stronger than his promises to the French.
But not much. On 29 July the Ambassador in Berlin, Goschen, reported
Bethmann’s unwise plea for British neutrality on condition that France
was not deprived of European territory; the answer made it clear that
Britain could not afford to see France crushed. 2 On 31 July the mobilisa-
tion of Russia and Germany, the German declaration of war emergency
and the German ultimata to Russia and France led Grey to require
assurances from Paris and Berlin that Belgian neutrality would be
respected, but he refused to offer Lichnowsky an assurance of British
neutrality in return. 3 On the other hand, he was still refusing any commit-
ment to France on 1 August, pointing out that French commitments to
Russia were unknown to Britain. Officially the French government were
not claiming a British military commitment but privately their Ambassador,
Cambon, was raising the question of British honour.
1 World Crisis (London, 1929), vol. 1, p. 204.
2 British Documents, vol. xi, nos. 293, 303. 8 Ibid. no. 448.
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It was not until 2 August that the British Cabinet was prepared to
concede a guarantee of the French northern coasts. By then a formal
assurance of support for intervention had come from the Conservative
party, Luxemburg had been invaded, France and Belgium had begun to
mobilise and the Belgians had made it clear that they would resist if then-
turn came. 1 The movement of the German army into Luxemburg had
been accompanied by perfunctory allegations of imminent French incur-
sions; the invasion of Belgium was being similarly prepared by a grotesque
charge of unneutral conduct, and attempts began to create or invent
incidents on Germany’s frontier with France.
This propaganda made little impression. In contrast, the facts of French
conduct eased the way for British intervention. Not only were French
forward defences evacuated to avoid provocation but mobilisation was
delayed until the commander-in-chief was threatening his resignation. 2
And the German ultimatum was met with the suggestion that news of
promising developments in Austro-Russian relations made it premature. 3
In fact, these marked no advance. Sazonov had produced a new formula,
but it did not offer a standstill in mobilisation or the ‘halt in Belgrade’. 4
Berchtold, for his part, was merely repeating earlier prevarications.
Meanwhile, German support for mediation had collapsed. Bethmann had
become the advocate — for military reasons — of an early declaration of
war on France, in spite of the obloquy: the opposition came from Tirpitz,
not yet ready for a naval challenge to Great Britain. Once committed
to a strong policy Bethmann was not strong enough to face modifying
it in response to new developments. It was the kaiser who took most
interest in a supposed British offer on 1 August to guarantee the neutrality
of France if the German armies did not attack her. 5 What was actually
said is still obscure; there was almost certainly confusion of thought, if
not irresolution, in London. In contrast the fatal rigidity of German
military and political thinking is shown by Moltke’s embarrassment® and
the harsh terms of the Chancellor’s proposed acceptance. He would
require Britain to ‘engage herself with her entire armed forces for the
unconditional neutrality of France during a Russo-German conflict’, the
scope and duration of which was ‘for Germany alone to decide’. 7
In the event, the declaration of war upon France and the final ultimatum
to Belgium followed according to plan on 3 August, providing Grey with
the ripe case for intervention which he made in his famous speech on that
1 The international guarantee of Luxemburg differed from that of Belgium in being
‘joint’ only and not ‘several’ as well, thus involving a lesser obligation upon an individual
guarantor. 2 Albertini, op. cit. (Italian edition), vol. in, p. 97.
3 British Documents, vol. xi, no. 428.
4 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, vol. 11, no. 42 1.
5 Ibid. vol. in, nos. 562, 575.
6 After resisting on logistic grounds the kaiser’s proposal to turn the German army
about for a march on Russia, Moltke went back to his office and burst into tears.
7 Ibid. no. 578.
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day. This was, on analysis, an admission that he had lost control of
British foreign policy. But his hearers did not analyse, they accepted the
identity of national interest and moral duty set before them. Grey did not
ask for a vote for war. That followed the formality of an unheeded sum-
mons to Germany to stop the invasion of Belgium. The period of grace was
used to pass German warships under British guns to Constantinople,
where they dazzled the Turks into a military alliance.
Like the chance of British neutrality — if it existed — the chance of sup-
port from their nominal allies, Italy and Rumania, was discarded equally
deliberately by the central powers. The race for the operational offensive
had prevented the sequence of declarations of war taking the logical form
of Russia against Austria, followed by Germany against Russia, and France
against Germany. Hence technical aggression by Germany released the
satellite allies, whose public opinion would not, in any event, have allowed
them to fight . 1 Berchtold, who had ignored the German plea that Italy
should be bribed with ‘ compensations ’, thought her neutrality was good
enough . 2 Instead of their defecting allies, those allies’ recent victims,
Turkey and Bulgaria, were to join the central powers, though not at
once.
In his last interview with the British ambassador, Goschen, Bethmann
uttered the famous reproach that Britain was — in contrast to the other
powers — going to war for the sake of a ‘scrap of paper’. It was an error
in political analysis as well as in public relations. The issue of Belgian
neutrality indeed dissolved isolationism and pacifism in Great Britain
as only a moral factor could do. But in taking the guilt out of distrust
and jealousy of Germany it put these forces in the service of what was
fundamentally balance-of-power politics. Elsewhere, without this sanction,
the final challenges of the crisis fired nationalism equally beyond expecta-
tions. In countries where great political parties of the left professed
adherence to an international socialist cause, in France and Germany,
parliamentary solidarity with the government was virtually unanimous.
Grey’s appeal in the House of Commons for intervention on the side of
law and order stirred no more conscientious enthusiasm than did Beth-
mann’s declaration in the Reichstag that ‘necessity knows no law’, his
promise that ‘the wrong we do we shall try to make good’ and his plea
that ‘whoever is threatened as we are can only think how to hew his way
through’. The peoples did not ask for positive war aims and there were
none fit to give them besides the will of France to recover Alsace and
Lorraine. Neither the Germans nor the British had a ready-made imperial
plan in stock; even the Austrians had no acquisitive purpose in the parti-
tion of Serbia, while the Russian territorial ambitions were at least as
1 Documenti diplomatici italiani, quinta serie, vo!. 1, no. 101.
2 Diplomatisce Aktenstucke zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges 1914 (Vienna, 1919), vol. Ill,
no. 1 17.
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repugnant to their allies as to their enemies . 1 Each belligerent government
was prepared to claim that the war was at the worst preventive, and each
hastened to compile and publish a collection of its recent diplomatic cor-
respondence, with exculpatory omissions and paraphrases, in order to
prove more than this. These publications, distinguished in macabre co-
operation by a different colour for each of the first six combatants, on the
whole satisfied the intelligentsia of each country — in spite of the rival
publications, soon available in translation — that the war was not merely
a preventive but a defensive one.
1 Sec note i on page 149 above.
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I n 1909 Norman Angell published his polemic The Great Illusion, in
which he argued that the increasingly international character of trade,
commerce and finance had rendered wars between sovereign states not
merely unprofitable, but positively harmful to victors and vanquished
alike. A decade earlier had appeared a remarkable six-volume treatise
entitled The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations
by Ivan S. Bloch, a Warsaw banker. Bloch began on the sound tactical
principle that firepower was bestowing ever greater strength to the
defensive; so that in future wars infantry must take refuge in trenches or
suffer fearful carnage. He envisaged wars of the future as enormous
sieges, with famine as the final arbiter. Bloch, like Angell, concluded that
war had become impossible — except at the price of suicide — since even
the winners would suffer the destruction of their resources and risk social
disintegration.
These and other warning voices made little impact on either soldiers or
statesmen in the decade before 1914. The consolidation of the rival
alliances, a succession of international crises, and the increasing likelihood
of an explosion in the Balkans, were but the surface symptoms of a
profound malaise. Politically these years provide a terrible indictment of
the self-defeating quest for national security through secret diplomacy and
armed might. Psychologically, too, nations were being conditioned for war :
by propaganda; by the spurious application of the Darwinian struggle
to the human species; by bitter class divisions; and not least by self-
delusion as to the nature of war. The romantic view of war obscured both
predictions like Bloch’s and actual experience as recent as the fighting in
Manchuria in 1905.
The conflict which began in August 1914 was not known to contem-
poraries as ‘The first world war’. Its origins were essentially European;
in the power struggle between Austria and Russia in the Balkans, and
Anglo-French fear of German domination of western Europe. Yet the
war, once loosed, rapidly gathered a momentum of its own, overflowed
geographical boundaries and the control of European statesmen, and
became truly world-wide in its repercussions. One of these, ironically, was
that Europe itself emerged with diminished importance on the world stage.
If statesmen, by their vertiginous diplomacy of bluff and counter-bluff,
brought Europe to the brink of the abyss after the assassination of Arch-
duke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, it was the General Staffs who gave the
final push. Once Austria had declared war on Serbia on 28 July the
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generals’ pressure for full and immediate mobilisation defeated the
belated efforts of Grey and others to avert war. Years of preparation had
been necessary to articulate the ponderous military mac hi nes for action.
Victory was thought to depend on mobilising before the enemy. The
General Staffs’ assumption — and their political power — is necessary to
explain why general mobilisation by Russia was speedily followed by the
Central Powers and then by France and Britain. From that point the
huge armies, rather than their creators, began to dictate events.
In retrospect it is astonishing that none of the belligerents was prepared
either materially or mentally for a long war. Politically they anticipated a
short struggle based on the traditional system of alliances, and militarily a
contest between professional armies with the civil populations as spectators
at a safe distance. Only slowly was the nineteenth-century concept of ‘the
nation in arms’ replaced by the twentieth-century version of ‘the nation
at war’.
Germany was well organised in most respects for a short decisive war.
Her well-tried system of conscription for two or three years’ full-time
training, followed by longer periods of reserve and landwehr service, gave
her in 1914 an army of some five million men, including reserve corps,
suitable for immediate employment at the front. The General Staff, the
‘ brain’ of the German army, had been carefully selected and trained, and
was unrivalled for professional knowledge and skill. Tactically the
Germans had gauged the potentialities of machine guns and heavy
howitzers and were much better equipped with both than their enemies.
On the strategic plane the Germans had led the way in developing the
military use of railways almost to an exact science. Not the least among
Germany’s assets was the army’s high prestige in the hearts of the
people.
None of these advantages was evident in Germany’s ally. The Austro-
Hungarian army numbered too many defeats in its recent history, and its
racial mixture was a serious weakness which conscription had accentu-
ated. In equipment and leadership it was inferior to Germany; and,
worst of all, mistrust and friction had grown between the allies since the
early 1890s, when German strategists began to give priority to the
western front without keeping the Austrians informed of their plans.
On the Entente side France had made strenuous efforts to overcome
her inferiority in potential military manpower — approximately 5,940,000 to
9,750,000 — by training nearly every able-bodied male. In 1913 a highly
controversial Army Law increased the period of conscript service from
two years (adopted in 1905) to three, revealing a fear that the German
army, also enlarged by recent legislation, was becoming more than a
match for the French. Thus on the outbreak of war France could call on
nearly four million trained men to Germany’s five million : but with the
significant difference that France placed little fighting value on her
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reservists. In the 1900s French military doctrine was founded on patriotic
fervour and the offensive spirit, qualities which were allowed to conceal
grave deficiencies in equipment and weapons. Her one first-class weapon,
the 75 mm field gun, was consequently too heavily relied on. Russia’s
assets were her immense resources of manpower and the reputation of her
troops for courage and stubborn endurance. Her leadership was poor,
her troops ill-educated and her manufacturing resources were far below
those of the great industrial powers. The British Expeditionary Force
provided the elite of the Entente’s forces, being indeed the best trained,
best equipped, and best organised contingent with which Britain had ever
started a war. In numbers, however, its 120,000 men only fitted it for a
marginal role in 1914, considering that the Germans brought about one
and a half million men into line against France in August, while the
French Field Army numbered over one million. The British General Staff
moreover, except for the unheeded Cassandra Lord Kitchener, was con-
vinced that the war would be short and its own military contribution
strictly limited.
The Central Powers’ political preparations did not match their military
planning. The participation of Britain released Italy, ever a doubtful ally,
from her obligations under the Triple Alliance. Rumania’s territorial
greed for both Bessarabia and Transylvania caused her also to remain
temporarily neutral, thus depriving the Central Powers of a flank attack
on southern Russia and in turn exposing their own flank in the Danube
plain. The allegiances of Bulgaria and Turkey would clearly be influenced
by the opening moves of the war, as well as by fresh memories of the
Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 in which they had been losers. Britain’s
prompt declaration of war, following Germany’s invasion of Belgium,
surprised the Central Powers but did not unduly perturb them. They
underrated the B.E.F. and discounted the value of the Royal Navy in a
short war.
Germany’s central position and the depreciating asset of her alliance
with Austria-Hungary gave her compelling reasons for staking all on a
short war. This in turn led to concentration in the west. The German
General Staff had become increasingly convinced since the 1890s that a
quick decision was unobtainable on the eastern front, and in any case
Russian finances might collapse if France were beaten. The gradual
evolution of the plan designed to overwhelm France within six weeks was
largely the work of Count Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff
from 1891 to 1906. Schlieffen’s greatest technical problem was how to
prise open the French frontier so as to enable armies containing about a
million troops to deploy. Between Luxemburg and Switzerland the
frontier was naturally strong, and had been heavily fortified by the French
since 1871. Schlieffen’s solution, as befitted a professional technician un-
concerned with politics, was to violate the neutrality of the Low Countries,
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place the numerical weight on his right wing, and aim at the encirclement
of Paris. The idea of a modem Cannae became his obsession. The German
centre and left wing would be deliberately left weak so that if the French
chose to attack them they would only put themselves further into the net.
Only a token force would be left on the eastern frontier to help the
Austrians contain the slowly mobilising Russians, who could be cmshed
at leisure after the fall of France.
Schlieffen’s successor, Helmuth von Moltke, altered some of the details
of the draft plan of 1905, notably by cancelling the infringement of Dutch
territory and strengthening the left wing. For these changes in the ‘master
plan’ he was to be criticised — excessively so — after 1914, but it has
recently been shown that Schlieffen himself grew increasingly worried
about his plan, realising that he had solved intricate problems of man-
power and movement only on paper. In fact the plan left so many
problems unsolved and depended on so many assumptions of enemy
reactions that one authority has called it ‘a snare and a delusion’. 1 At
best it was a bold gamble which required a superb commander and a great
deal of luck if it was to succeed.
Germany certainly was fortunate in the reactions of the French High
Command. General Michel, who in 19 11 had accurately divined the
German plan and proposed to meet it by a concentration in the north
between Lille and Rethel with a defensive deployment elsewhere, was
replaced as Chief of Staff by the offensive-minded Joffre. In 1913 the
latter adopted Plan XVII which embodied an all-out offensive to break
through the supposed German centre and to paralyse his communications.
This plan was doomed to fail from its misreading of the enemy’s distribu-
tion. Out of nearly a million and a half men deployed in the west, half were
allotted to the three armies forming the right wing, nearly 400,000 to the
two armies in the centre who were to advance through the Ardennes, and
only 350,000 to the remaining two armies in Lorraine. The French threw
in about 450,000 troops east of Metz and 360,000 into the Ardennes,
leaving de Lanrezac, who had also grasped the German plan, with only
250,000 men to defend the vulnerable Belgian frontier.
Both the French offensives met with disaster. On 20 August they were
defeated east of Metz at Sarrebourg and Morhange, and four days later
were repulsed from the Ardennes with heavy losses — the wooded defiles
cancelling the advantage of their 75 mm guns. But although beaten the
French armies were not annihilated; by retreating in good order on to
their rail communications they were soon in a position to send reinforce-
ments northward as the main German threat developed.
Meanwhile, after entering Belgium on 4 August, the northern German
armies had captured the great fortress of Liege — essentially a triumph for
1 B. H. Liddell Hart in the Foreword to G. Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a
Myth (London, Wolff, 1958).
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their heavy artillery — forced the Belgian army to retire on Antwerp, and
threatened to engulf de Lanrezac’s 5th Army. Here the B.E.F., by its rapid
shipment and deployment, was able to play a decisive part despite its
small numbers. On 21 August the British reached the Belgian frontier and
encountered the enemy. By the delaying battles at Mons (23 August)
and Le Cateau (26 August) the vastly outnumbered British prevented the
encirclement of the French left wing, and greatly added to Moltke’s
confusion since he thought they were still disembarking. Mistakenly
deducing that the B.E.F. must be based on the Channel ports, the German
1st and 2nd Army commanders von Kluck and von Btilow missed excellent
opportunities to cut them off - from the retreating French.
As the German armies marched deeper into north-eastern France,
in scorching summer heat, it slowly became clear to Moltke that the
Schlieffen plan was not working out. The British, French and Belgian
armies, though worsted in the frontier battles, had not been crushed—
indeed they were retreating towards good communications and defensive
positions, whereas the Germans, especially Kluck’s army near the Channel
coast, were outpacing their supplies. Real difficulties certainly existed
but they were magnified in the Chief of Staff’s mind. Moltke was an
intelligent man and not lacking in courage; what he did lack was good
health and its usual concomitant, self-confidence. He had never had full
confidence in his predecessor’s plan, and in the opening weeks of the war
he made a number of errors which finally ended the possibility of a quick
knock-out victory in the west. In the first place he did not keep sufficiently
close to the front, setting up his headquarters first in Coblenz and later in
Luxemburg. Since neither he nor his operations staff visited the front
during August he lacked sufficiently fresh information to give orders to his
army commanders. This underlined his second mistake of allowing his
subordinates too much latitude as his famous uncle had done — though
not without hazard — in 1870. On the right wing the energetic Kluck
quarrelled with his pessimistic neighbour Bulow, while in Lorraine Crown
Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was allowed to press on his advance instead
of retiring to draw the French into a trap. Thus by the end of August the
Germans were advancing all along the line, and the outlines of the
Schlieffen plan were already blurred. On 25 August Moltke made a third
mistake in detaching six corps from the 2nd and 3rd Armies and dispatch-
ing them to Prussia. These and other questionable decisions need not
have proved fatal to a more resolute commander, but by the end of August
Moltke was approaching a physical breakdown. When, therefore, on
30 August Kluck turned his army south-east to maintain contact with
Bulow, Moltke did not intervene and allowed the plan for the encircle-
ment of Paris to be abandoned.
This gave the retreating allies the opportunity to counter-attack and
Joffre, prompted by Gallieni, the Military Governor of Paris, ordered the
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about-turn and general offensive on 6 September (the battle of the Marne).
Kluck was drawn into a separate battle with Manoury’s newly formed
6th army and a thirty mile gap opened between him and Biilow. In fear
lest Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the B.E.F., should throw
his cavalry into this gap, Biilow began to retreat on 9 September. Kluck
reluctantly conformed and Moltke, now a broken man, permitted a
general retreat. This was a severe blow to German strategy, though
tactically they avoided a serious defeat by taking up a defensive position
behind the natural bastion of the river Aisne. Since Prince Rupprecht had
failed to break through in the fortified area of Nancy, the only hope of a
quick victory after mid-September lay in outflanking the allies to the
north. Neither side possessed the means of mobility to achieve this
manoeuvre, and as the result of a series of checks the lines were extended
from the Aisne past Amiens and Arras towards the Channel coast. In the
process the original B.E.F. was virtually annihilated in stemming repeated
attacks around Ypres in late October and November. Meanwhile Ant-
werp had fallen on 9 October but the bulk of the Belgian army escaped
along the coast and made contact with the allies behind the line of the
river Yser.
The German retreat from the Marne and the replacement of Moltke
by Falkenhayn in mid-September clearly witnessed the failure of the
Schlieffen plan. The margin of failure, however, was narrow and despite
the strategic check the Germans were now in a most advantageous posi-
tion. Nearly a tenth of France was in their hands and the occupied area
contained the key to French industrial output; in fact 80 percent of French
coal, almost the whole of her iron resources and the great north-eastern
factories were lost for the rest of the war. Germany’s economy was
correspondingly strengthened and — equally important — she could afford
to let the allies do most of the attacking. Until March 1918 the lines of
the great siege never changed as much as ten miles.
The opening encounters in the east had meanwhile revealed a character-
istic pattern of the Russians suffering severely at German hands but
themselves getting the better of the conflict with Austria. The Russian
commander-in-chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, promptly upset German
calculations by invading East Prussia even though his armies were not
fully concentrated. The Russian first and second armies, commanded by
Rennenkampf and Samsonov respectively, outnumbered the Germans by
more than two to one and had an excellent opportunity to crush them by a
pincer movement in the region of the Masurian lakes. The two armies,
however, showed no inclination to co-operate, possibly because their
commanders had been personal enemies since a quarrel during the war
with Japan. The German commander, von Prittwitz, lost his nerve in the
crisis and was replaced, when he ordered a withdrawal behind the
Vistula, by General von Hindenburg, who emerged from retirement, with
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Ludendorff as his Chief of Staff. Rennenkampf’s immobility on the
eastern frontier and the Russians’ folly in transmitting unciphered wire-
less orders enabled Ludendorff to turn the tables. Leaving only a
cavalry screen before Rennenkampf he threw the bulk of his forces south
against Samsonov. Under converging pressure Samsonov’s army was
almost destroyed and the commander committed suicide. Then receiving
reinforcements from France, Ludendorff turned on Rennenkampf and
drove him out of East Prussia. In these battles — of Tannenberg and the
Masurian Lakes — the Russians lost a quarter of a million men and
a vast amount of war material.
The psychological impact of Tannenberg would have been even greater
had not the scales tilted against the Central Powers in Galicia. Two
Austrian armies had invaded Poland but were halted by a Russian
thrust against weaker forces protecting their right flank. By the end of
August the latter had been driven back through Lemberg so that the
Austrian Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf was obliged to withdraw
his armies from Poland to avoid being cut off. By the end of September
the Austrians had retreated almost to Cracow. In Poland the fighting
raged back and forth throughout the autumn and the year ended with the
Russians, exhausted and critically short of munitions, back on the line of
the Nida and Dunajec rivers. Russia’s exhaustion was balanced by the
poor performance of the Austrians whose two attempted invasions of
Serbia had both been contemptuously repulsed.
The miscarriage of the military plans gradually brought sea power into
prominence. Although on the outbreak of war the British Grand Fleet
outnumbered the German High Seas Fleet by 20 dreadnoughts to 13,
there had been so many developments in the last decade — in gunnery,
submarines, mines, wireless and aircraft — that superiority in capital ships
would not necessarily assure Britain of victory in a great sea battle. For
their part the German Admiralty adopted a Fabian policy. They would
avoid a major fleet action until their minelayers and submarines had
whittled away the enemy’s superiority and would then seek the oppor-
tunity for a surprise stroke. This policy suited the natural defensive
strength of Germany’s naval bases but it had obvious drawbacks : it en-
tailed the loss of Germany’s overseas trade and greatly restricted her
interference with the sea-borne supplies of Britain and her allies. More-
over the British Admiralty’s cautious policy of preserving ‘the fleet in
being’ deprived the enemy of opportunities to reduce the odds. Admiral
Jellicoe did not rule out the hope of a Nelsonian victory but regarded his
primary duties as preventing invasion, maintaining the security of the
ocean routes and ensuring communications with the B.E.F. in France.
Outside home waters Britain suffered several humiliations before con-
firming her supremacy. In the Mediterranean two of Germany’s fastest
ships, the battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, evaded
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Allied attempts at interception and reached Constantinople, thus playing
an important part in inducing Turkey to enter the war on Germany’s side
at the end of October 1914. Britain’s naval concentration in the North Sea
permitted Germany’s commerce raiders a few months of expensive free-
dom. The light cruiser Emden, for example, led a charmed life in the
Pacific and Indian Oceans until destroyed by the Australian cruiser
Sydney on 1 November at Cocos Island. More serious was the defeat on
the same day of Admiral Cradock’s cruiser squadron by Admiral von
Spee’s more powerful cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Coronel. This
spurred the Admiralty to action. Admiral Sturdee was dispatched with
the battle cruisers Inflexible and Invincible and these accounted for von
Spee at the Falkland Isles on 8 December. By the end of 1914 Germany’s
power on the surface of the outer seas had been completely destroyed.
Early in the new year the war at sea began to take on a more frightful
form. Britain’s command of the ocean routes caused Germany to con-
centrate her efforts at the land termini and to rely increasingly on the
submarine, hitherto considered a weapon for use in coast defence only,
and against which British defences were wholly inadequate. The deter-
mination to pursue this anti-commerce policy was clinched by the
victory of the British battle cruisers in an action off the Dogger Bank on
24 January. Since the policy of wearing down the Grand Fleet was
failing Pohl, who replaced Ingenohl as Commander of the High Seas
Fleet, proposed to Falkenhayn an offensive submarine strategy which,
if it were to succeed, must be unlimited. Meanwhile, in January 1915, the
Admiralty had advised British merchant ships to fly a neutral flag or no
ensign in the vicinity of the British Isles, in order to increase the difficulties
of German submarines. Germany retaliated on 4 February by declaring
the waters round the British Isles, including the Channel, to be a war
zone within which all enemy vessels would be sunk, and neutrals would
sail at their own risk. This helped to free the British government from its
feeling of moral obligation to uphold the Declaration of London of
1909 which, although never ratified by her, had hitherto hampered
Britain’s power to put maritime pressure upon Germany because of its
interpretation of the rules on contraband of war and blockade. Britain
now claimed the right to intercept all ships carrying goods to Germany
and if necessary bring them into British ports for search. Serious friction
with neutrals, especially the U.S.A., resulted but Germany forfeited her
advantage by torpedoing the Lusitania off northern Ireland on 7 May.
This pointless act of brutality directly affected the U.S.A. since over a
hundred American lives were lost, and it dealt the first serious blow at her
determination to remain neutral.
Britain’s command of the seas enabled her or her allies to sweep up all
Germany’s overseas colonies — without difficulty in most cases. A New
Zealand expedition captured Samoa in August 1914 and in September the
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Australians took New Guinea. Japan, who entered the war in August 1914
as an ally of Britain, sent an expedition against the German naval base of
Tsing-Tao on the Shantung peninsula, and eventually captured it early in
November. In Africa Togoland speedily capitulated to the British, but the
Cameroons was not finally brought under Anglo-French control until
early 1916. General Louis Botha, formerly Britain’s enemy, conquered
German South West Africa and, equally important, put down a rebellion
by disaffected Boers which — except for the Irish Rising at Easter 1916 —
was the only wartime revolt against Imperial authority. The outstanding
exception to the easy conquest of Germany’s overseas empire was German
East Africa, her largest and richest colony. There, assisted by the terrain,
the brilliant General von Lettow-Vorbeck distracted some 200,000
Imperial troops until the end of 1917. He himself continued a guerrilla
resistance until after the armistice in Europe. The significance of these
‘side-shows’ lay perhaps less in their effect on the war in Europe than in
their political repercussions on such countries as India and Japan for
whom the war would otherwise have been remote in every sense.
In the long run Germany’s submarine campaign and Britain’s retaliatory
blockade were to bring home the experience of modem war to the
civilians of all the European belligerents. Early in 1915, however, it was in
the air that it first became apparent that the war would no longer be con-
fined to the military front. In 1914 the Great Powers were ill-prepared to
adapt air power to military purposes, and consequently the value of
aeroplanes on the western front was virtually restricted to reconnais-
sance. But from January 1915 Zeppelin raids began on the English coast,
reaching their peak in the summer of 1916, to be followed by aeroplane
raids. Initally there may have been some attempt to discriminate between
military and non-military objectives, but it soon became evident that in a
war for existence civilian morale had been added to traditional targets.
By the end of 1914 statesmen were all more or less bewildered by the
failure of the generals to bring the war to the quick decisive conclusion for
which alone they had prepared militarily, politically and above all
economically. In 1915 attempts began to find some way out of the stale-
mate which, especially on the western front, was replacing a war of
movement by the gigantic siege foreseen by Bloch. The problem prompted
two main reactions : a variety of military experiments and a gradual civil
adaptation to the Tong haul’.
Falkenhayn was one of the most intelligent generals of the war but he
was confronted with an insoluble strategic dilemma by the failure of the
Schlieffen plan and the resolute commitment of Britain to the defence of
France. He believed that the Anglo-French armies would have to be
beaten to end the war and that a decisive victory over Russia was unobtain-
able in 1915. Yet he appreciated that a war of movement, with the
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promise of great territorial gains, was only possible on the eastern front.
He had also to contend with the opposition of Hindenburg and Luden-
dorff, who naturally believed that theirs was the decisive theatre, and whose
prestige with the emperor was high after their debut at Tannenberg.
Against his better judgement, therefore, Falkenhayn decided to concen-
trate against Russia in 1915 while standing generally on the defensive in
the west. Great victories in the east did indeed result but France gained
time to recuperate and Britain to mobilise her second-line and Dominion
forces.
Where desire to preserve the territorial gains of 1914 influenced German
strategy, the French were inflamed by determination to liberate their
homeland. Concentration against the main armies of the enemy was also
orthodox military doctrine, yet without any tactical solution to the
supremacy of the defensive barrier it could only lead to disaster. The
French offensives in 1915 in Artois, on the Aisne and in Champagne
demonstrated chiefly that against resolute and skilful defenders the
attackers invariably suffered more casualties. Britain’s much smaller
numbers and length of front 1 deprived her of an independent strategic
voice, and in any case Sir John French firmly supported Joffre. Further-
more, this unqualified commitment to the French on the western front,
combined with the fact that most of Britain’s senior generals were now
serving in France, made it almost impossible for the government to
obtain objective service opinion on the best way to employ Britain’s
unexploited asset of sea power in support of the army. The western front
remained the decisive theatre, if only because so few soldiers were prepared
to think otherwise.
Although the defensive system on the western front was far from fully
developed in 1915, the basic elements of trenches and barbed-wire en-
tanglements supported by machine guns were nevertheless impregnable to
infantry and horsed cavalry, particularly as Britain and France were
pitiably short of heavy artillery and high-explosive shells. The Entente
offensives followed a depressingly similar pattern. ‘After air reconnais-
sance of the German positions, artillery pounded their wire, machine gun
nests and trenches. After the barrage had been lifted to the enemy’s rear —
creeping barrages just in front of the advancing infantry were not practised
until 1916 — the infantry went over the top in waves about one hundred
yards apart, with the men in each wave about six to eight feet from each
other.’ 2 The attackers usually carried the first line of trenches and some-
times the second before being halted by the enemy’s reserves. Counter-
1 In November 1914 the French held about 430 miles, the British 21 and the Belgians 15;
a year later the British share had been increased to about 50 (see C. R. M. F. Cruttwell,
A History of the Great War , 1914-1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1934, p. 109 n.; I am
greatly indebted to this work, and to B. H. Liddell Hart, A History of the World War,
1914-1918, London, Faber, 1934).
8 T.Ropp, Warm the Modern World (new rev. ed., New York, Collier Books, 1962), p.246.
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attacks then frequently re-established the lines on the original positions.
At no point during 1915 did British or French attacks gain more than
three miles.
The one real tactical innovation of the year was the German use of
poison gas against the French sector at Ypres on 22 April. The Germans
had actually experimented with a form of tear gas in Poland the previous
January but the intense cold rendered it ineffective. As frequently hap-
pened, initial disappointment caused the German Command to put little
faith in the new weapon. The inventor, an extremely able chemist Fritz
Haber, was deprived of facilities for manufacturing shells and was
obliged to discharge his lethal clouds of chlorine gas from cylinders.
Furthermore, no reserves had been concentrated to exploit the confusion,
so that although a four-mile gap was created by the flight of agonised
troops the Allies were allowed time to seal it. Germany thus incurred the
odium for introducing a novel weapon without gaining a compensating
advantage, for the improvement of respirators on both sides soon reduced
the effectiveness of gas attacks.
Joffre’s strategic plan — designed to end the war in 1915 — was for a
pincer movement against the great bulge left by the German retreat in
1914. Anglo-French forces would attack in Artois and the French alone in
Champagne. These offensives continued intermittently through the spring
and autumn with negligible gains. The two sectors were too far apart to
exert a direct effect on each other, and Joffre pursued the incompatible
aims of a breakthrough preceded by long bombardments, thus throwing
away the trump card of surprise. In 1915 France suffered nearly one and a
half million casualties. The British too lost equally heavily in proportion
to their numbers. Sir John French’s conduct of the battle of Loos (25-26
September), where the New Armies were ‘ blooded ’, was severely criticised,
and eventually led to his replacement by Sir Douglas Haig in December.
At the same time French’s Chief of Staff, Lieut. -General William Robertson,
went home to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (C.I.G.S.). This
move brought an improvement in that the strategic direction of the war
was removed from Kitchener’s overburdened shoulders, but it also added
a powerful voice to the ‘Westerners’ in London.
The boldest solution to the trench barrier in France was the ‘ Eastern
Strategy’ advocated in Britain by such influential Cabinet ministers as
Churchill, Lloyd George and Kitchener. While differing in detail they
agreed essentially that modem developments had so changed conceptions
of distance and powers of mobility that a blow struck in some other
theatre of war would correspond to the traditional flank attack — which in
France was impossible. Such an operation would accord perfectly with
Britain’s traditional amphibious strategy, and would also bring into play
the military resources of the Empire.
Unfortunately the prospects of an ‘indirect approach’ were marred
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from the outset by disagreements as to destination and objectives.
Kitchener, whose prime anxiety was the security of Egypt, was for
crippling Turkey by a landing in the Gulf of Alexandretta ; Lloyd George
favoured a Balkans policy designed to support Serbia; while Churchill’s
gaze was riveted on the Dardanelles even before the deadlock occurred
in France. An added complication was the ambivalence of that aged
firebrand Lord Fisher, whose complete co-operation, as First Sea Lord,
was essential. Fisher had long envisioned a landing on the Baltic coast,
and though he appeared to support an expedition to the Dardanelles
early in 1915 he was at best lukewarm and never had faith in a purely
naval assault. Such divergencies of view are commonplace; the tragedy
was that profound disagreements were papered over by inadequate plan-
ning. Thus the Dardanelles expedition eventually dispatched fulfilled
Lloyd George’s warning of 1914 that ‘Expeditions which are decided
upon and organised without sufficient care generally end disastrously’. 1
The decision to attempt to force the Dardanelles by naval action alone
was undoubtedly inspired and engineered by Churchill. Unfortunately
the interrelated problems of silencing the Turkish batteries and clearing
the mines from the Narrows were never fully appreciated in London.
When the navy failed in its only attempt to force its way past the Turkish
defences on 18 March — by the smallest of margins, it subsequently
appeared, for the Turks had exhausted their ammunition— Fisher’s
growing pessimism and Kitchener’s willingness to send troops resulted in
a muddled decision to attempt combined operations. These necessitated a
fatal hiatus of six weeks which the Turks used well to fortify the Gallipoli
peninsula. However, owing to a misunderstanding between the military
commander. Sir Ian Hamilton, and Admiral Robeck, the army — with
French participation — was left to bear the brunt of the campaign. Despite
forfeiting surprise the initial landings on 25 April succeeded brilliantly,
and there were to be several more occasions — notably on 6 August when
fresh landings were made in Suvla Bay — when victory seemed within the
Allies’ grasp. It eluded them every time through a mixture of ill luck,
lukewarm support from Whitehall and from Egypt, remarkable Turkish
resilience and almost incredible blunders in execution. Sir Maurice
Hankey, then secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, touched
on two fatal flaws when he noted that the number of troops needed for
this extremely difficult operation had never been coolly assessed—
Hamilton was simply given those that could be spared, invariably ‘too
little and too late’; and too much depended on the (false) assumption
that the Turks would put up only weak resistance.
1 R. R. James, Gallipoli (London, Batsford, 1965), p. 14 . 1 have relied primarily upon this
admirable book in the following paragraphs though not fully sharing the author’s con-
clusions. See also J. North, Gallipoli , the Fading Vision (London, Faber, 1936), especially
pp. 83-100, for the strategic implications of the campaign.
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Rather surprisingly Gallipoli rapidly degenerated into another ‘ trench
front’ and western front tactics were faithfully repeated there with
similar results. Towards the end of 1915 the bold decision was made to cut
losses and withdraw from the peninsula. Ironically the withdrawal was
the most brilliant achievement since the landings in April.
This was a strategic defeat with far-reaching consequences. Gallipoli
destroyed Hamilton’s reputation, undermined Kitchener’s and eclipsed
Churchill’s. In the long run it discredited Asquith too, although he
personally was a ‘Westerner’. Most tragically it appeared to damn the
‘ Easterners’ ’ argument that there was an easier way to end the war than
that of slow attrition of men and resources. After 1915 it was difficult for
even the most fervent ‘Easterner’ to suggest more than token diversions
from France, say to Italy or Salonika. After Gallipoli there seemed to be
no short route to victory.
On the ultimate wisdom of the Gallipoli venture opinion remains
divided. Was it, as Sir Basil Liddell Hart believes, ‘ a sound and far-sighted
conception marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled
even in British history’; or merely a wasteful distraction of resources
from the decisive theatre? The problem is accentuated by uncertainty as to
the precise objectives of the expedition. Could Russia have been kept in
the war the gain to the Allies would clearly have been enormous. Some
historians doubt whether the Allies had the vital munitions with which to
supply Russia even had Constantinople been captured. This was true of
1915 but of the vast amount expended in the next two years in the west
even a small proportion would have been invaluable to Russia. As for the
manpower situation, with nearly half a million men cooped up in the
Salonika bridgehead it is patently untrue that every man was needed for
the western front. In sum, while the Dardanelles probably did present a
glittering strategic prize, the precise consequences of the fall of Con-
stantinople must remain a matter for speculation.
The painful process of civil adaptation to demands of near-total war
was rendered doubly difficult by the excessive deference paid to the pro-
fessional expertise of the generals in 1914. 1 Governments saw their task
as to furnish the resources demanded by the military leaders to achieve
decisive victory, thus ignoring Clausewitz’s dictum that warfare constitutes
a continuation of policy by other means. Only slowly did it dawn on the
statesmen that the military experts were equally baffled by a war that
transcended their experience and their imagination.
Though the war itself inevitably raised problems of civil-military rela-
tions for all the belligerents, the outcome in each case was to a large
extent predetermined by political tradition. In Britain, for example,
1 M. E. Howard (ed.), Soldiers and Governments (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957),
pp. 11-86.
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constitutional practice assigned authority to the political head of the War
Office; in fact Kitchener’s tenure of the War Office (1914-16) confused the
issue so that Lloyd George achieved only an uneasy compromise as
Prime Minister (1916-18), eventually securing the removal of General
Robertson and Admiral Jellicoe but being obliged to retain Haig, whom
he mistrusted, to the end. German experience, at least since the retirement
of Bismarck, went in the opposite direction, and the war only brought
this trend to a climax. By 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff were regarded
as the indispensable saviours of Germany. They controlled strategy;
compelled the dismissal of uncongenial ministers ; and prevented any hope
of a negotiated peace by their extravagant territorial claims. This domina-
tion of the Supreme Command over the civil government did more than
lead Germany to military defeat: it fatally disrupted the constitutional
fabric of the Reich. The French experience was different again. The army
had grown increasingly unpopular since the Dreyfus affair, and, after
mounting criticism of the High Command’s conduct of the war through
1914-16, the failure of Nivelle’s offensive was the last straw. Following in
the tradition of Danton and Gambetta the French gave direction of the war
to the Radical Clemenceau, who left no doubt as to where authority lay.
The generals’ failure to win a quick victory presented their governments
with the task of mobilising national resources on an unprecedented scale.
In meeting this challenge governments not merely maintained mass
armies in the field: they also virtually obliterated the distinction between
soldier and civilian and transformed European society almost beyond
recognition. These momentous developments can only be hinted at by
touching on French unpreparedness in 1914 and the gradual British
adaptation to the demands of total war.
French conviction that the war would be short, and hence that every
fully trained soldier should be mobilised immediately, was encouraged
by the prevalent military doctrine of the Nation in Arms, though little
trust was placed in reservists. 1 Even the rare individuals, such as Colonel
Mordacq, who were sceptical of the military arguments, still tended to
believe that financial needs would bring the war to an end in a year at
most. Thus the opening months of the war brought a traumatic shock.
The Minister of War was appalled to find the daily demand for shells
approximately 100,000 when he could provide only 12,000. Heavy artillery
had been badly neglected on the assumption that it would be of little value
in a war of movement. Several munitions factories closed because skilled
workers had been allowed to rush to the colours. Worst of all the govern-
ment showed little understanding of the need to preserve economic
resources and control industrial production. On the eve of war no less
than 15 million tons of France’s total annual output of 21 million tons of
1 R. D. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms, 1866-1939 (New York,
Columbia U.P., 1955), pp. 83-136.
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iron ore came from the Briey Basin near Metz. Yet in the first week of the
war this vital area was lost almost without fighting because, it was later
revealed, no one in the High Command or the government had grasped the
relevance of iron ore to the French war effort. The guiding assumption,
that in a short war supply would not be a critical factor, would of course
have seemed less ridiculous had the Schlieffen plan succeeded.
Britain’s reluctance to depart from the traditional methods of sustain-
ing a war was certainly not attributable to a ‘nation in arms’ policy, since
she relied upon a small professional army and a reserve of Territorials
who were not obliged to serve overseas. In one sense Britain was able to
pursue her traditional policy until 1916 because the Channel and a
powerful navy once again allowed time for gradual expansion of her
armed forces. But the more complex demands of modem war beyond
numerical expansion were only slowly understood and accepted. Wide-
spread belief in a short and limited war effort was only part of the
explanation. There were also the characteristic attitudes of ‘antipathy to
state action and indifference to science and technology’ which obliged
Asquith’s government — and the country generally — to continue a policy
of ‘business as usual’ until the spring of 1915. 1 What eventually shattered
this complacency was the critical shell shortage that could no longer be
ignored after the battle of Neuve Chapelle on 10 March 1915. When Sir
John French leaked information about this to the press the government’s
credit was badly shaken. The creation of the Ministry of Munitions under
Lloyd George, which followed in May, was a striking early example of
government intervention in industry and restriction of trade unions that
set a precedent for a flood of subsequent controls.
By 1915, also, the indiscriminate volunteering encouraged by Kitchener
was seen to have exacerbated problems of war production, since so many
skilled workers had been lost. Many of the trade unions dourly opposed
the filling of these vacancies by unskilled or female labour until they had
wrung certain guarantees from the government. By stages these acute
problems of the allocation of manpower forced the government — a
coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and Labour from May 1915 — to admit
the need for some measure of conscription, something quite unacceptable in
1914. National registration in August 1915 gave the first hint of compul-
sion, to be followed in January 1916 by conscription applying only to
single men and widowers without children. Universal conscription became
law in May 1916. Apart from its military value conscription had at least
two important social consequences: it broke down the last barriers of
prejudice against the full employment of women (only domestic service
suffered); and for the first time it brought experience of war to a cross-
section of the whole population, affecting one in three adult males.
1 A. Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, Bodley
Head, 1965), especially pp. 39-44, 52, 56-85, 90-4, 151-86, 226-39.
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Yet it is astonishing how reluctantly the sacred principles of laissez
faire, namely, free trade, free currency and free enterprise, were given up.
Through 1915, for example, Asquith hesitated to interfere to check rising
prices, while the attempt to allocate war expenditure to particular tasks
was only abandoned in July 1915 when the daily cost of the war to
Britain reached £3 million. Moreover, despite weakening opposition to
widespread nationalisation the government moved slowly even in 1916 so
that even when Asquith resigned so important a matter as food control
was still under discussion.
The advent of Lloyd George to the premiership, and a great increase in
the strain of the war on Britain in 1917 — especially through the sub-
marine campaign — brought a surge of government activity which by the
end of the war had left few aspects of public, or indeed private, life un-
touched. The railways, and the coal and shipping industries, for example,
came under direct state supervision, over 200 factories were nationalised
and nine-tenths of the country’s imports were bought directly by the
state. Food rationing and the drastic restriction of drinking hours
ensured that no one entirely escaped the war’s indirect effects. It was
hardly surprising if most people by 1918 calmly accepted the idea of
state collectivism. The laissez-faire principles of ‘ Liberal England ’ were
included among the notable domestic casualties of the war years.
On the eastern front the Russian armies took another fearful hammering
in 1915. The Russians attacked first and between January and April
succeeded in driving the Central Powers back from southern Poland to the
foothills of the Carpathians. Then on 1 May von Mackensen began his
dramatic breakthrough at Gorlice-Tamow in Galicia. His onslaught, after
a short bombardment, surprised the Russians; they recoiled from the
Carpathians in disorder, and by 14 May the Austro-German advance had
reached the river San eighty miles from the starting-point. Meanwhile
Italy had been preparing for war, though if possible she intended to secure
her territorial claims from Austria, notably the ports of Trieste and Pola,
without fighting. Haggling between Rome and Vienna continued through-
out the winter of 19 14- 15 before Austria was finally outbid by the
Allies — who could afford to be more lavish in their proffers of enemy
territory. The secret Treaty of London, signed on 26 April 1915, promised
Italy not only the Brenner frontier (including some 300,000 Germans)
but also Istria and the larger part of Dalmatia. However, even Italy’s tardy
declaration of war on Austria in mid-May failed to check the advance.
Przemysl was captured on 3 June and Lemberg on 22 June. This Russian
retreat, involving the loss of three-quarters of a million men in prisoners
alone, only ended in October on the line from Riga on the Baltic to
Czemowitz on the Rumanian frontier.
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Meanwhile, a pincer movement had ended Serbia’s gallant resistance at
the third attempt. On 6 October von Mackensen and von Seeckt, his
Chief of Staff, led Austro-German armies across the Danube, and simul-
taneously two Bulgarian armies struck westward into southern Serbia
across the rear of the main Serbian army. This effectively cut off the Serbs
from their British and French allies who were belatedly advancing from
Salonika. Rather than submit to encirclement and surrender the Serbian
forces split up and the survivors retreated westward through the Albanian
mountains, some of them to find refuge in Corfu. The conquest of Serbia
not only removed the threat to Austria’s flank but also gave Germany free
communication and virtual control over the Balkans and through Asia
Minor to the river Tigris. On the other side their failure to link up with
the Serbs in time left the Anglo-French forces with a seemingly pointless
bridgehead at Salonika.
One other ‘side-show’ was opened in 1915. Britain’s involvement in
Mesopotamia was prompted by political rather than military considera-
tions and the ensuing campaign remained peripheral to the war in Europe.
An Anglo-Indian expedition captured Basra in November 1914 to secure
Britain’s oil supply from the Persian Gulf. The temptation to exploit this
military success against the Turks proved too strong for the commanders
on the spot so that by mid- 19 15 the British had advanced 180 miles up
the Tigris to Kut. From there the egotistic General Townshend con-
ceived the ambition of pressing on to Baghdad: his plan was optimistically
sanctioned bytheWar Cabinet eager for success somewhere to offset failure
in France. Townshend soon discovered he had underestimated Turkish
strength; he was checked at Ctesiphon on 22 November and by 8 December
was invested at Kut. After several relief attempts had been beaten off
Townshend eventually surrendered on 29 April 1916. The Turks treated
their 10,000 prisoners so barbarously that less than a third survived. 1
In 1916 the centre of gravity shifted back to the western front, thus
signifying the failure of Falkenhayn’s compromise strategy of 1915. On
the Allied side the close of 1915 saw the first, overdue attempt to arrive at
a concerted policy. Meeting at Joffre’s headquarters on 5 December the
military chiefs adopted the principle of a simultaneous general offensive
in 1916 by Britain, France, Russia and Italy. A series of preliminary
attacks was planned for the opening months of the new year to use up
Germany’s reserves, while also gaining time for Britain’s new armies to
train.
These simultaneous offensives were never executed because Falkenhayn
disrupted the Allied plan by striking first. His strategic appreciation at the
end of 1915 was founded on the belief that Britain was the mainstay of the
1 Cruttwell, History of the Great War, pp. 346-8; A. J. Barker, The Neglected War:
Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 (London, Faber, 1967).
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enemy alliance. Britain herself could only be crippled indirectly through
submarine warfare since Falkenhayn believed that the front held by her
armies in France was unsuited to offensive operations. His solution was
therefore to compel Britain to make peace by eliminating her allies.
Russia was already nearing exhaustion, and Italy could be contained by
Austria with a stiffening of German troops. Only France remained but
she too, Falkenhayn believed, was nearing the end of her military effort.
To break the will of the French people it was not necessary to break the
trench deadlock : a policy of attrition would suffice. France could be bled
to death if only the right objective could be found. Falkenhayn’s choice
fell upon Verdun. This fortified area threatened German communications;
it presented a salient which could be ‘ nibbled away ’ ; and above all its
proud history endowed it with an emotional significance to the French
which far transcended its military value. Falkenhayn’s tactical plan was
starkly simple: a series of continuous limited advances would draw
France’s reserves into the mincing machine of the German artillery. The
attacker would economise in manpower by protecting his infantry with
short, intense bombardments which would enable them to rush and
consolidate new positions before the enemy could bring up his reserves
to counter-attack. Falkenhayn’s calculations of French reactions were
sound, as were also his new tactics, but he seriously underestimated both
the French determination in defence and the effects of attrition on his own
men.
The German offensive, which began on 21 February, was assisted by
French preoccupation with their own coming attack. Also Verdun’s
legendary impregnability was now illusory since the forts had been de-
nuded of guns and were in use largely as shelters. The trench defences
were shallow and the troops thinly spread. Yet somehow the first advances
were checked, so that by the time Petain took command of the defences
early in March the first crisis was over.
France’s allies sacrificed their preparations for the summer offensive in
order to relieve pressure on Verdun. Haig took over the Arras sector from
the French 10th Army, thus establishing a continuous British front from
the Yser to the Somme; the Italians made their fifth unrewarding attack
across the river Isonzo ; and the Russians threw in their untrained masses
against the Germans at Lake Narocz, near Vilna. These gallant gestures
failed to halt the steady German advance towards Verdun, and at first
casualty returns seemed to justify Falkenhayn’s frightful calculations.
When Fort Vaux fell on 7 June it seemed that Verdun was doomed.
Again the Russians attempted to relieve the pressure, both from the French
at Verdun, and from the Italians who were being counter-attacked in the
Trentino. Brusilov, commanding on the south-western front, began on
4 June what was supposed to be a distracting advance, but which de-
veloped into a major offensive. The Austrian 4th Army near Luck and their
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7th Army in the Bukovina put up such weak resistance that Brusilov
continued his advance for three months. Unfortunately he lacked reserves
to exploit his breakthrough and by the time they had arrived from the
northern front the Germans had rushed reserves to seal the gaps. Brusilov’s
attempts to renew the offensive after it had halted succeeded largely in
exhausting his own army, and although he had taken 450,000 prisoners his
huge losses — nearly a million in action and thousands more through
desertion — broke Russia’s offensive power and also brought revolution
appreciably nearer.
Despite its ultimate failure Brusilov’s offensive had far-reaching effects.
It checked the Austrian attack on Italy, compelled Falkenhayn to with-
draw troops from the western front and so abandon plans for a pre-
ventive blow against the British on the Somme, and also discouraged him
from renewing the grinding attrition at Verdun. Brusilov’s success against
the Austrians also influenced Rumania in her fateful miscalculation to enter
the war on the side of the Entente in August. Indirectly Brusilov’s success
was partly responsible for Falkenhayn’s supersession by Hindenburg and
Ludendorff. Falkenhayn’s ultimate hopes for the Verdun offensive had
not been realised, yet he had succeeded in so weakening the French armies
that they were incapable of playing the major role in the projected summer
offensive. Verdun in fact marks the end of France’s seniority in the partner-
ship on the western front, despite the fact that Generals Nivelle and Mangin
had recovered most of the ground lost at Verdun by the end of 1916.
Thus the great offensive planned in December 1915 was barely recognis-
able in the Anglo-French attack on the Somme. These battles witnessed the
debut of the Kitchener armies and of the tank; and also the tacit accep-
tance of an attrition policy by the Allies.
After a week’s bombardment, which sacrificed any possibility of sur-
prise, the offensive began in brilliant sunshine early on 1 July. The new
4th Army, commanded by General Rawlinson, attacked with 13 divisions
on a fifteen-mile front north of the Somme, while the French — their
contribution greatly reduced — attacked with 5 divisions on an eight-mile
front mostly south of the river. The absence of surprise, perfect visibility,
and the failure of the bombardment to destroy the enemy’s wire and
machine guns, rendered the attackers’ chances slim. Moreover, the tactics
of an orderly advance in rigid lines proved suicidal. The attacks failed
everywhere except on the extreme right where the French met weaker
opposition. The appalling casualties — 57,400 — were the highest ever
suffered by the British Army in a single day. A renewal of the offensive on
14 July with more flexible tactics actually penetrated to the German
second positions but further progress proved impossible. Haig had gradu-
ally to modify his initial hopes of a breakthrough to capture Bapaume
and Cambrai. The need to attack specifically to assist the French at
Verdun disappeared in mid-July, yet Haig continued his methodical
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attacks for insignificant territorial gains until the winter rains obliged
him reluctantly to order a halt in November.
Meanwhile, on 15 September the British first employed a novel weapon
which was eventually to play a major role in breaking the trench deadlock,
namely, the armoured fighting vehicle mystifyingly named ‘the tank’.
Pre-war experiments with motor-driven caterpillar-tracked vehicles had
aroused little enthusiasm among senior officers. Only the insight and
boldness of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had
enabled Colonel Ernest Swinton and other tank pioneers to have the
vehicles ready for action in 1916. Their first performance fell short of
expectations. Only 49 tanks were available and 17 of these broke down
before reaching the start line. Of the remainder only 9 were able to keep
up with the infantry and these did make a good impression, particularly in
clearing the village of Flers. Considering the crews’ hurried training and
the lack of time to correct mechanical faults it was not surprising that so
many tanks had broken down. The prospects of piercing through the deep
German defences were so dim by mid-September that it must remain
doubtful as to whether the commander-in-chief was justified in experi-
menting with the one weapon which — given favourable circumstances —
might have had a decisive effect.
The Somme campaign raised strategic issues which had their roots in
the ‘Easterners versus Westerners’ controversy of the previous year and
which were also to influence the conflict between Lloyd George and the
High Command in 1917. The failure of the Gallipoli venture probably
ended the possibility of a decisive blow at the weak flank of the Central
Alliance. At any rate the orthodox view shared by the majority of
British and French statesmen and generals was that Germany could only
be defeated by a concentration of effort on the western front. It followed
that the Allies must adopt an offensive strategy : the Germans’ territorial
advantage demanded it; financial considerations were urgent; and above
all the political solidarity of the Entente depended on a continual striving
for victory. French losses in the reckless offensives of 1915 and the
Verdun bloodbath also entailed that the British must perform the lion’s
share of the attacking. These considerations dispose of some of the wilder
criticisms of the British and French High Commands for the persistent
offensives between July 1916 and November 1917, but they by no means
provide a blanket justification for their methods of execution.
On the strategic level the British and French followed too literally and
narrowly the principle of concentration on the decisive front, not realising
that Germany’s central position and greater efficiency in moving troops
by rail enabled her to concentrate even more speedily wherever the
greatest danger threatened. 1 Her repeated dispatches of reinforcements to
1 For a clear statement of the ‘Western’ view see Field-Marshal Sir W. Robertson,
Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914-1918 (London, Cassell, 1926), vol. 1, pp. 238-89.
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save the Austrians amply demonstrates this advantage. Lloyd George and
Churchill grasped the point that even if the western front was crucial —
in the sense that defeat there could not be compensated for elsewhere —
Germany’s resources must nevertheless be stretched as far as possible to
give frontal assaults any chance of success. Hence the plan to aid Serbia in
1915, and Lloyd George’s frustrated design to reinforce the Italian front
early in 1917. Tactically, the Allied generals — with a few exceptions such
as Smith-Dorrien and, Plumer — were slow to evolve more sophisticated
methods than ‘clumsy bludgeoning’, and were too prone to reinforce
failure rather than call off offensives to reduce losses. This attitude of
dogged persistence was evident also in unwillingness to surrender hard-
won ground even when, as on the Somme in the winter of 1916, the offen-
sive had petered out in a marshy valley overlooked by the enemy. Thus
although Haig and his Corps and Divisional commanders laboured under
great difficulties in 1916 — with mostly inexperienced troops, a strongly
defended sector to attack, and uncertain French support — it remains the
case that generalship was undistinguished.
Sir Douglas Haig personally had several admirable qualities as com-
mander-in-chief, particularly his unruffled patience in dealing with the
French, and his grasp of the enormous administrative problem. His
gravest defects stemmed from his physical remoteness from the front,
probably an unavoidable handicap, which was magnified by Haig’s un-
shakeable confidence in victory — founded essentially upon religious faith
— and his failure to appoint independent-minded staff officers who would
tell him the truth, however unpleasant. In the last resort it was Haig’s
belief that the Germans could be beaten in 1916 that caused him to
continue the Somme offensive after the pressure had lifted from Verdun.
As hopes of a breakthrough faded he put his faith in the wearing down of
the enemy, taking the most optimistic estimates of their casualties. 1 Haig’s
published papers do not reveal the critical intelligence that might have led
him to an objective assessment of British, French and German losses.
At sea Germany’s unrestricted submarine campaign was temporarily
suspended in April 1916 because of growing friction with the U.S.A. It
was this enforced change of policy that indirectly brought about the only
major sea encounter of the war, the battle of Jutland. Late on 30 May the
British Fleet left its bases on one of its regular sweeps through the North
Sea ; while early the following morning the German Fleet also put to sea
with the hope of cutting off a section of the enemy. Admiral Sir John
Jellicoe, commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, remained extremely
cautious. Appreciating that he alone could ‘lose the war in an afternoon’,
he was determined to fight a major battle only under very favourable
1 R. Blake (ed,), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, 1914-1919 (London, Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 175. The problem of casualty statistics is discussed later.
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conditions. Early in the afternoon of 31 May Vice-Admiral Sir David
Beatty, commanding the battle cruiser fleet, sighted five enemy battle
cruisers. Impetuously he engaged, and, after losing two battle cruisers,
came upon the main German battle fleet. His task now was to lure the
enemy towards Jellicoe, but fog and eventually darkness foiled him.
Nevertheless Jellicoe had manoeuvred between the German Fleet and its
bases and a great victory seemed possible. The chance was bungled, for
although he was sighted Vice-Admiral Scheer, commanding the German
battle fleet, managed to slip through the destroyer screen and regained the
safety of home waters. Both sides claimed a victory. The Germans had a
better case in the numbers of ships and tonnage sunk, yet Scheer had failed
in his aim of engaging only a part of the Grand Fleet, and indeed was
fortunate to escape without greater damage. The Grand Fleet remained
intact and the stranglehold of blockade was unrelaxed. Failure to gain a
decisive victory on the surface soon caused Germany to revert to sub-
marine warfare — and on a wider scale. The sinking of neutral shipping off
the coast of North America in July pointed to the almost inevitable
consequence of America’s entry into the war. After Jutland the great fleets
played only a secondary role. Scheer was virtually paralysed when de-
prived of his flotillas for the submarine campaign; while Jellicoe was
hampered by the diversion of his destroyer escorts to combat the sub-
marine. In four years of war the great fleets were in action for barely half
an hour.
The year ended bleakly for the Entente with the submarine dominant.
Monthly losses in shipping rose from approximately 109,000 tons in June
1916 to 368,000 tons in January 1917. Most sinkings took place in the
Mediterranean where Germany ran less risk of antagonising the U.S.A.
This rising toll encouraged Germany’s war leaders to re-open unrestricted
U-boat sinkings in February 1917 on the calculation — or gamble — that the
Entente would be beaten on land and by starvation before American
participation became effective.
1916 ended, like 1915, with the defeat of one of the Entente’s allies.
Rumania had awaited an opportune moment to enter the war in pursuit of
her greedy territorial claims, and Brusilov’s offensive caused her to take
the plunge in August 1916. It proved an unwise gamble. With Wallachia
sandwiched between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria no country in Europe
was worse placed for defence. Only the Russians could possibly give her
direct support but they regarded her with contempt. 1 Her troops suffered
from pitiful equipment and wretched leadership. Moreover, by attacking
into Transylvania she exposed her flank to a bitter enemy, Bulgaria.
1 The Russian Chief of Staff Aiexeiev thus expressed his bitterness to the tsar: ‘Such are
my feelings, that if His Majesty ordered me to send fifteen wounded soldiers to Rumania,
I would on no account send a sixteenth’ (quoted by Cruttwell, History of the Great War,
P 295)-
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The Central Powers’ campaign, initiated by Falkenhayn and executed
by Ludendorff, was strategically perhaps the most brilliant of the whole
war. While the main Austro-German army, under Falkenhayn, gripped
the Rumanians in Transylvania, a Bulgarian army led by von Mackensen
invaded the Dobruja, thus paralysing the enemy advance by a threat to
his rear. Falkenhayn broke through the mountain passes into Rumania in
mid-November while Mackensen withdrew his army from the Dobruja
and crossed the Danube at Sistova. Both armies converged on the capital,
Bucharest, which surrendered on 6 December. However, the bulk of the
Rumanian army escaped northward to a secure front behind the river
Sereth. There, re-equipped and re-trained by the French, they held out
until March 1918.
The gain of three-quarters of Rumania provided a tonic for the Central
Powers after the stalemate at Verdun and the Austrian collapse before
Brusilov. Conversely the Entente was again humiliated through moving
too slowly to support a Balkan ally. Materially Rumania was a valuable
victim, providing Germany with supplies of oil and wheat without
which her resistance could hardly have been prolonged until the end of
1918.
The close of 1916 witnessed important changes among the civil and
military war leaders. In Britain Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime
Minister. In June the former had gone to the War Office when Kitchener
was drowned on a voyage to Russia. His advocacy of a more vigorous
conduct of the war by a small War Cabinet under his own chairmanship
eventually led to Asquith’s resignation in December. The new Premier
was critical both of the policy of attrition and of the ability of the High
Command, yet in practice he failed to make drastic changes, primarily
for two reasons: he was never politically secure, being dependent on
Conservative support in the House of Commons; and he feared the out-
come of a direct clash with the generals, whose popular prestige was by
now formidable. Instead he relied on devious methods which only
worsened the situation. Against this uneasy compromise with the ‘ brass-
hats ’ must be weighed Lloyd George’s dynamic leadership through a
streamlined War Cabinet; his ingenuity in securing vital appointments,
such as the recall of Churchill to the Ministry of Munitions ; and his flair
for promoting solutions — such as the convoy system — against expert
conservatism.
In December also Joffre was removed by being made a Marshal and
promoted to a sinecure. He had inspired confidence in the battle of the
Marne and in 1915, but was clearly unequal to the unique problems
posed by the trench deadlock. His successor was the most junior of the
Army Commanders, General Robert Nivelle, whose reputation had been
made at Verdun. Nivelle possessed the rare asset among first world war
generals of a fluent and persuasive tongue. He converted Briand and,
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more surprisingly, Lloyd George to his plan for a lightning offensive to
end the war in the spring of 1917.
Among the Central Powers Ludendorff was now virtually in control
of strategy, both Falkenhayn and Conrad having been removed from the
supreme commands. On 21 November Emperor Francis Joseph died, to
be succeeded by the last Habsburg ruler, Charles VIII. The latter would
gladly have made peace if only his ally had allowed him to negotiate
separately. At the same time Lord Lansdowne’s peace proposals were
receiving publicity in Britain. Nevertheless tentative peace feelers from the
Central Powers were firmly rejected on 10 January 1917. Mutual war
weariness could not surmount the military obstacle : namely, that Germany
would not surrender territorial gains while there was a hope of victory,
while the Entente could not contemplate peace without the restoration of
French territory and Belgian independence as a minimum. Even President
Woodrow Wilson was soon to realise the impossibility of ‘ a peace without
victory’.
Shortly before his replacement Joffre assembled a Conference of the
army commanders at Chantilly to determine strategy for 1917. He and
Haig agreed that the attrition process of the past year had left the German
army near to breaking point on the western front. Further limited
offensives to exhaust the enemy’s reserves in the opening months of the new
year could pave the way for a decisive victory in the spring. Joffre knew
that French manpower resources were nearly exhausted and announced
that this would have to be her last major offensive. With ‘Western Front’
opinion thus dominant General Cadoma’s proposal, supported by Lloyd
George, that the British and French should send reinforcements to Italy
for a decisive blow against Austria, was disregarded.
The prospects of Joffre’s unimaginative strategy were immediately
affected by Nivelle’s promotion. The latter not only promised a sudden
breakthrough in contrast to Joffre’s reliance on cumulative attrition : he
also drastically changed the details of the plan. Joffre had intended the
British to launch a major attack early in February to the north and south
of the old Somme battlefield, with the French supporting them southward
as far as the Oise. These attacks would be followed by a smaller French
offensive in Champagne and — unless enemy resistance unexpectedly
collapsed — the British would then switch their attack to Flanders. By
contrast Nivelle intended the Somme offensives to provide the distraction
for the major blow by the French in Champagne. Thus the French were
now to play the major role and to assist them Haig was asked to take
over the French line south of the Somme as far as Roye.
Thesealterationsand others caused protracted friction between the Allies.
Haig was pleased to hear that the French would make a bigger effort,
but he insisted on certain conditions before taking over the French line
since this obviously handicapped his plans for a Flanders offensive. These
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inevitable disagreements called for a unified control, but unfortunately
the devious methods adopted by both Briand and Lloyd George, who
tried to achieve this at the Calais Conference on 26 February by sub-
ordinating Haig to Nivelle, only increased ill-feeling between the generals
and between the allies. Haig agreed to serve under Nivelle’s direction
during the offensive provided he could appeal to his own government in an
emergency. Nivelle was left in the unsound position of directing an Allied
campaign while simultaneously commanding the French army.
Ludendorff dislocated Nivelle’s plan by an even more effective manoeuvre
than Falkenhayn’s attack on Verdun the previous year. Anticipating a
renewal of the Somme offensive, Ludendorff had an artificial line of
enormous strength (‘The Hindenburg Line’) built across the arc Lens,
Noyon, Reims some ten miles behind the front. Nivelle refused to believe
the growing evidence that the enemy was preparing to retreat, yet this he
did, beginning at the end of February and systematically devastating
what traces of civilisation remained in no man’s land. Supporters of
attrition take this retreat as proof of the German ‘defeat’ on the Somme;
critics regard it as ‘a master stroke both in conception and execution’
designed to thwart the enemy by surrendering useless ground. At any
event Nivelle’s offensive was left in the air, while Haig had no option but
to concentrate on the Arras sector where the front remained unchanged.
Nivelle added to his difficulties by failing to adjust his plans and by
boasting openly of his intentions. Moreover, when the major French
offensive began near Reims on 16 April he possessed the confidence
neither of his government, his ally nor even his army commanders. The
attacks, which lasted until 7 May, penetrated up to four miles on a
sixteen-mile front, but this limited success contrasted too sharply with
Nivelle’s own promises. In any case the French armies were crumbling in
his hands. The combination of demoralisation among front-line troops at
being ordered once too often to capture unbroken defences, with long
festering grievances over lack of leave and wretched living conditions,
caused mutinies to spread through the armies until by early May nearly
half the units were affected.
Thus the poilus finally ended the cult of the reckless offensive. Petain,
who replaced Nivelle on 15 May, at once announced that the French must
remain strictly on the defensive pending the arrival of American divisions,
and the provision of more tanks and heavy artillery. By shrewdly com-
bining firmness and reforms Petain quickly restored order. Not even
Petain, however, could revive the French army’s offensive power in 1917.
The British had no option but to distract attention from the French front,
so that Haig’s persistent attacks in April and May were justifiable on
political grounds. The Flanders offensive began auspiciously on 7 June
with a model limited advance by Plumer’s Second Army (with ‘Tim’
Harington as Chief of Staff). Surprise was assisted by the explosion of
15
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19 huge mines under the enemy defences, and the infantry then succeeded
in straightening out the Ypres salient by capturing the Messines ridge.
An unfortunate delay then occurred until the battle of ‘third Ypres’
(also confusingly known as Passchendaele) began on 3 1 July. In view of
the controversy that still surrounds this offensive it must be stressed that
Haig was no longer attacking at the insistence of the French. Indeed as
early as 1 1 May Petain made it plain that he was opposed to any big
attack, and on 19 May he added that Haig’s projected advance towards
Ostend was certain to fail. Foch, whose usual preference for attacking
was never in doubt, referred to Haig’s plan on 2 June as ‘a duck’s march’,
and considered the whole thing ‘futile, fantastic, and dangerous’. Even
Robertson advised Haig to tone down his predictions that the campaign
would yield decisive results. 1 In extenuation of Haig it should be noted that
his determination to capture the Flanders ports Ostend and Zeebrugge
was possibly influenced by Admiral Jellicoe’s mistaken belief that unless
these U-boat bases were captured Britain would soon be forced to make
peace. Nevertheless it was for Haig and not the Admiralty to decide
whether in fact this mission could be carried out from the land. 2
Although the offensive made some progress in August and September,
Haig’s judgement was at fault in thinking that a breakthrough was
feasible given the nature of the climate and the terrain. Meteorological
records over the past eighty years showed that heavy rain could be
expected from mid- August. Moreover, the ‘swamp map’ produced by
Tank Corps headquarters to denote the bogs created by the destruction
of the drainage dykes by the bombardment — begun on 15 July — showed
‘a wide moat of liquid mud’ over much of the sector to be attacked on
31 July. The Tank Corps was eventually ordered to stop sending these
pessimistic reports to G.H.Q., and as Haig’s most recent biographer
comments, ‘ There is no evidence that Haig ever saw one of those “ Swamp
Maps”; had he done so, he might have felt differently about some of the
reports he was receiving. ’ 3
If the urgent need to capture the Channel ports partly extenuates Haig
for the attacks in August, his motives for continuing the offensive into
November long after that objective had ceased to appear attainable
need careful scrutiny. Again it has been wrongly stated that Haig was
attacking under French pressure, or because he doubted their ability to
withstand a possible German attack. There is no contemporary evidence
1 The references to P&ain are from Maj.-Gen. Sir C. E. Callwell (ed.), Field Marshal Sir
Henry Wilson (London, Cassell, 1927), vol. 1, pp. 349, 354-5. Foch’s sarcastic remarks are
quoted by B. H. Liddell Hart in Foch the Man of Orleans (Penguin ed. 1937), vol. 1, pp. 253-
4. Robertson’s cautionary advice was prompted by distrust of Lloyd George ; see J. Terraine,
Haig: the Educated Soldier (London, Hutchinson, 1963), p. 330.
2 Terraine, Haig, p. 334. See also Captain S. W. Roskill, ‘The U-Boat Campaign of 1917
and Third Ypres’, in the Royal United Services Institute Journal (November 1959), pp.
440-2.
3 Terraine, op. cit. p. 342.
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to support this view; on the contrary on 8 October, after a visit from
Petain, Haig wrote to Robertson that the French were quite capable of
holding their own in defence and that there was no need for him to take
over more of the French front. 1
Haig’s persistence was due neither to callousness nor to the alleged
tactical necessity of gaining the Passchendaele ridge. The fundamental
reason was that the optimism that had deceived him in 1916 was still
colouring his judgement. Haig accepted the information fed him by his
Chief of Intelligence, General Charteris, which strongly suggested that
‘German civil and military morale were so near breaking point that a
ruthless continuation of pressure might result not only in winning the battle
but also in winning the war ’ . As late as 2 8 September he predicted ‘ decisive
results ’ from the attack at Broodseinde, and only after its failure on 4 October
did he settle for the limited object of the Passchendaele-Clercken ridge. 2
There is ample evidence that the Flanders offensive succeeded in
wearing down the strength and morale of the German 4th Army; but
it is probable that the British troops suffered equally severely. Indeed,
since the Germans were for the most part defending, and had adopted the
sensible tactics of defence in depth with scattered strong points rather
than lines, it would not be surprising if the attacker’s morale was more
severely strained. The demoralising effect of Passchendaele, as well as the
more publicised shortage of men, has to be taken into account to explain
the breakdown of British defences in March 1918.
The arguments for and against the policy of attrition must to a large
extent depend upon casualty statistics, yet these have been notoriously
difficult to assess. Among the numerous difficulties three may be men-
tioned. German figures relate to periods of time and sectors of the front
and these do not always coincide with particular battles. Secondly, the
sources on both sides frequently do not distinguish between killed,
wounded, missing and prisoners. Lastly, many of the German records
were destroyed during the second world war, while certain of the Allied
returns have either disappeared or are inaccessible; so that disparities in
the published accounts cannot be checked. These drawbacks have caused
some historians to eschew statistics altogether, while others have manipu-
lated them to support preconceived views. In particular one of the British
Official Historians, Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds, provided
support for ‘ the Westerners’ ’ view that German losses on the Somme in
1916 considerably exceeded those of the Allies; but his methods of
1 Blake, The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, p. 258. The French then held approximately
350 miles to the British ioo, but much of the French line in the far south towards the Swiss
frontier saw hardly any fighting throughout the war.
* M. E. Howard quoting from the Haig papers in a letter published in the R.U.S.I.
Journal (February i960), pp. 107-9. See also B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Basic Truths of
Passchendaele’, ibid. (November 1959), pp. 433-9; and Blake, The Private Papers of Douglas
Haig , pp. 255-60.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
reckoning have been shown to be completely unreliable. 1 Recent examina-
tion of available British, French and German sources does however point
to one clear conclusion: the balance of comparative losses on the western
front was decidedly against the Allies from 1915 to 1917
inclusive
1915
1916
1917
German losses : killed and missing
wounded t
170,312
677,916
295,572
896,879
281,524
776,943
Total
848,228*
1,192,451
1,058,467
French losses : killed and missing
wounded f
330.000
970.000
300.000
576.000
145.000
424.000
Total
I,300,000f
876, ooo §
569,000
British losses: killed and missing
wounded f
73 ,i 6 o
239,867
151,086
500,576
185,555
564,694
Total
313,027
651,662
750,249
* Total losses may be slightly larger. } February to November only,
t Includes those who died of wounds. § February to December only.
Losses in particular campaigns point to the same conclusion. For
example, on the Somme (i July to early November 1916) the highest
German figure is 500,000 (undivided) compared with the British total of
419,654 (also undivided) and the French 204,253. At Verdun between
21 February and the end of August 1916 the French lost 317,000 to the
Germans’ 300,212. At Third Ypres (31 July to mid-November 1917) the
British losses, according to the Official History, were 245,000 ; 2 the French
lost 8,525 (dead and wounded only); and the German Fourth Army,
covering a much wider frontage than that of the British offensive, lost
between 175,000 and 202,000. Total deaths (from all causes) on the
western front in 1914-18 were approximately as follows: British,
700,000; French, 1-3 million; German, 1-2 million.
But even if the numerical balance was clearly against Britain and
France two further questions must be raised : did the Germans still lose
more men than they could afford ; and when and why did their will-to-win
begin to decline? Although the attrition process never came near to ex-
hausting German manpower, the effect of heavy losses did begin to exert a
depressing influence from 1916, especially as the High Command became
obsessed with the policy of counter-attack. By the end of 1917 manpower
was posing a serious problem after the peak of 5-38 million for the Field
Armies (on all fronts) had been passed in June. Even so in March 1918
1 See M. J. Williams, ‘Thirty Per cent: A Study in Casualty Statistics ’and ‘The Treat-
ment of German Losses on the Somme in the British Official History’ in the R.U.S.I.
Journal (February 1964), pp. 51-5, and ibid. (February 1966), pp. 69-74. D f Williams has
generously provided me with a digest of his statistical researches into the British, French and
German sources and the figures quoted in this section are his. The conclusions drawn from
them however are my own.
2 In Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s estimation, however, the British suffered at least 300,000
casualties.
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Germany had 5-1 million men in the Field Armies (with 3-8 million of
these in the west) and a further 2 million approximately in the Home
Army. A striking decline is apparent as a result of Ludendorff ’s offensives,
for between March and July the Germans lost about 973,000 men, and
over a million more were listed as sick. By October there were only 2-5
million men in the west and the recruiting situation was desperate. Even so
the main German problem in I9i7and early 1918 wasnotsomuchnumerical
weakness as growing war-weariness combined with — and greatly in-
fluenced by — the increasing shortage of food. This view is supported by
the marked increase in disciplinary problems, especially in home-based
units, even while the Field Army was still advancing.
Thus no precise answer is possible as to the effectiveness of attrition.
During 19 14-17 the Allies, more especially the French, nearly bled them-
selves to defeat. German losses in those years, though much smaller than
Allied generals believed, were still more than they could afford. The
numerical imbalance only became of decisive importance from mid- 19 18
when the Germans had exhausted themselves by prolonged attacks and
their morale had been undermined, while on the Allied side the exhaustion
of France was more than counterbalanced by the arrival of the Americans.
Fighting in the West in 1917 did not end in the mud of Flanders. As
hopes of a breakthrough at Ypres waned, the Tank Corps was permitted
to plan a raid over the rolling downland near Cambrai. On 20 November
Byng’s 3rd army, preceded by nearly 400 tanks, achieved a remarkable
break-in, advancing as much as 7,000 yards in places and capturing 7,500
prisoners and 120 guns. Unfortunately reserves of tanks and troops were
lacking to press home the advantage while the two cavalry divisions
available were inexplicably inactive. On 30 November a German counter-
attack regained most of the lost ground, and also boosted their morale.
British disappointment was somewhat eased by the greatly improved
performance of the tanks.
The seriousness of the French army mutinies had been amazingly well
concealed from friends as well as foes. Russia’s long-impending military
collapse could not be concealed, especially after the Petrograd rising of
March 1917 which led to the deposition of the tsar. Briefly the Provisional
Government gave promise that ‘a peoples’ war’ would be vigorously
continued, but the revolution had come too late. Revolutionary propa-
ganda now provided the exhausted and dispirited troops with positive
political reasons for ending the war. Brusilov was given the Supreme
Command to make a last desperate offensive effort in July 1917. It
failed, and, by the time of the Bolshevist seizure of power in October, the
army had practically ceased to function. By the end of the year the
Bolshevists had signed an armistice and the Allies had no reason to hope
they would renew the struggle.
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The issue starkly posed by the end of 1917 was: could America give
effective assistance on land before the German troops released from
Russia could overwhelm the exhausted Allies in the west ? At sea the
impact of America’s entry into the war was felt almost immediately. Her
co-operation with Britain converted the naval blockade into a stranglehold
which was not impeded by respect for neutrals. At the same time the sub-
marine menace to Britain’s supplies gradually began to be mastered. It had
been a close-run thing. Submarine sinkings mounted steadily to a peak in
April 1917 when nearly one million tons of Allied shipping was lost. A
convoy system was only reluctantly tested by the sceptical British Ad-
miralty, yet the first experiment with a merchant fleet from Gibraltar in
May proved a success. By September the assistance of American destroyers
enabled trans- Atlantic shipping to be escorted in both directions; and at
the same time the anti-submarine offensive was reinforced by special
submarine-chasers, aircraft and a new type of mine. Germany had nearly
won the war against commerce with a mere 140 submarines on active
service of which seldom as many as 50 were operating at any time. 1
The heavy losses in merchant shipping in the Mediterranean was one of
the reasons why Italy was nearly defeated at the end of 1917. After the
Italians’ eleventh offensive on the Isonzo in August, Ludendorff decided
that Austria could not be relied on to hold for another year, and to save
his ally Italy must be crushed. His blow fell on the Caporetto sector on
24 October after a brief bombardment. In the disorganised retreat that
followed General Cadorna lost 250,000 as prisoners and thousands more
through desertion. He was replaced by Diaz after establishing a defensive
line on the river Piave, covering Venice. Britain and France now rushed in
reinforcements which would have been more valuable earlier in the year.
The Austrians, having outdistanced their transport, failed in repeated
attempts to turn the Italians’ defences.
The Italian crisis brought one incidental benefit to the Allies: it led to
the creation of a Supreme War Council at Versailles in November 1917.
Another crisis was necessary to secure real measures of Allied co-operation,
for initially the national representatives lacked executive authority; while
neither Haig nor Petain was willing to spare divisions to a general reserve.
The Allies’ campaign in the Middle East, using Egypt as the starting-
point in 1916, made rapid progress in 1917. On 9 December Jerusalem
surrendered to Allenby after a brilliant mobile operation; and in Meso-
potamia the British were now secure in Baghdad (see above, p. 187). These
successes could not immediately sway the delicate balance in Europe.
Russia was soon (2 March 1918) to sign the enforced peace at Brest-
Litovsk, and Ludendorff was certain to get substantial reinforcements
before the Americans were ready to participate in strength.
At the beginning of 1918 the initiative in the west clearly lay with
1 Ropp, War in the Modern World, p. 262.
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Germany. From November 1917 troop trains began to shuttle the bulk of
German forces from the Russian front to France, so that by early March
1918 they had 193 divisions against the Allies’ 173, counting the large
American divisions as the equivalent of two British or French. Yet
Ludendorff knew that he was struggling against time as well as with
hitherto impregnable defences. The submarine campaign was failing; the
effects of the blockade on the home front were becoming serious — for
example a general strike occurred in Berlin in January; and above all
American troops were now pouring into France. Ludendorff, like Moltke
in 1914, gambled on complete success, since a limited advance would only
drive the enemy back on to his communications while increasing the
attackers’ supply problem. For their part, if the Allies could withstand the
forthcoming offensive they could expect victory through sheer weight of
manpower and resources by 1919.
Despite ample warnings. Allied defensive preparations were inadequate.
No government was willing to denude other theatres to reinforce France.
Italy opposed the withdrawal of Allied troops sent during the Caporetto
crisis; the French government insisted on maintaining the Salonika bridge-
head; and a majority of the British Cabinet was eager to complete the
victory in Palestine. Lloyd George and the War Cabinet also deliberately
kept Haig short of reinforcements; considering that lives had been need-
lessly squandered by commanders with an irrational faith in the value of
repeated offensives, they feared that large-scale reinforcements would only
lead to further slaughter. Both sides had some grounds for their mistrust
and neither was wholly free from blame. It is easier to see in retrospect
that the government should either have given the commander-in-chief its
confidence or else have replaced him even at the risk of a political crisis.
Although mutual mistrust between Prime Minister and commander-in-
chief was to cause bitter recrimination after the disaster in March, the
connection between that disaster and the retention of reserves in England
was not so obvious as has often been assumed.
In the first place Ludendorff was able to build up a five to one supre-
macy on the 5th Army’s front without the British High Command taking
alarm. Indeed on 2 March Haig believed his front was so strong that he
doubted whether the enemy could be tempted to attack. 1 Secondly,
through misreading enemy intentions the defensive precautions were
inadequate. Thirdly, Ludendorff shrewdly dealt his main blow at the
juncture between the British and French fronts. Relations between the
Allies were at a low ebb mainly as a result of disputes as to how much more
of the front the British should take over, and the vexed question of forming
a general reserve. Thus inter-Allied controversy and miscalculation as
well as shortage of men prepared the way for a German breakthrough.
1 Blake, The Private Papers of Douglas Haig , p. 29 1. A good description of German
preparations is given by B. Pitt, 1918: The Last Act (Corgi ed. 1965), pp. 50-78.
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When the offensive began on 2 1 March the Germans had a superiority
of 69 divisions to 33 on the sixty-mile front between Arras and La Fere.
Ludendorflf’s aim was to split the Allied armies and roll up the British
against the Channel coast— a feat which Hitler’s Panzer forces were to
accomplish in 1940. Tactically the Germans showed a great improvement
on the stereotyped efforts of previous years. The essence of the new
method was infiltration. Specially trained groups of storm troops armed
with light machine guns, Light trench mortars and flame-throwers were
to cross the trench lines, by-pass strong points and machine gun posts and
try to penetrate to the enemy artillery. Ludendorff also grasped the
importance of surprise: he relied on only a brief preliminary bombard-
ment; distracting threats elsewhere; and full use of concealment, both by
the artificial means of gas and smoke, and the natural cloak of fog. Lastly,
though in practice he neglected it, Ludendorff was determined to apply
the principle of using his reserves to exploit success rather than to revive
sectors where the attack was flagging.
For five days all seemed to favour the attackers. South of the Somme
the German 2nd Army carried all before it until checked by the old Somme
battlefield, but north of the river the British defended tenaciously in the
Arras sector. Ludendorff delayed fatally in moving reserves to the more
successful flank, thus allowing the Allies time to recover from the initial
shock. In fact he only narrowly missed a complete breakthrough. The
British 5th Army was shattered, and Petain momentarily contemplated
breaking with his disorganised ally and retreating on Paris. This crisis at
last brought the Allies unity of command, for at a hurried conference at
Doullens on 26 March Ferdinand Foch was made Supreme Commander
to co-ordinate operations. The immediate value of this appointment, as
Haig shrewdly realised, was a generous flow of French reserves to the
British front.
On 28 March Ludendorff renewed the battering of Arras, but lacking
the assets of either fog or surprise he failed to dislodge Byng’s 3rd Army.
Again a little too late he switched his remaining reserves to support the
advance on Amiens. When this advance halted on 30 March it had
penetrated nearly 40 miles, and nearly 1,000 guns and 80,000 prisoners
had been captured.
Ludendorff next attacked in Flanders, breaking through a sector
weakly held by Portuguese troops on 9 April. By the end of the month the
British had yielded all the costly gains of 1917, though Ypres itself still
held out. The British suffered heavy losses but they denied the enemy a
breakthrough.
Slowly the balance of manpower began to tip against Germany, though
this was not apparent until the summer. Since the offensive began the
British had lost nearly 300,000 men and 1 0 divisions had been broken up.
Reinforcements were rushed from England, and divisions recalled from
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Italy, Salonika and Palestine. The Germans, with 208 divisions now in
France, still had the strength for further offensives but time was running
out. Already in the March crisis General Pershing had relaxed his rule
against the premature commitment of American troops, stipulating only
that they should fight as complete divisions. From the end of April
300,000 Americans were arriving every month; by mid-July seven divisions
were in action and fourteen more were preparing.
After a lengthy pause for recuperation Ludendorff attacked next on
27 May on the Chemin des Dames between Soissons and Reims. Shat-
tered British divisions had been sent to this supposedly quiet sector to
rest, but the French commander, Duchesne, had undermined an almost
impregnable position by massing his infantry in the forward trenches
where they became ‘cannon fodder’ for the skilfully sited German
artillery. On the first day the Germans made the longest advance in the
west since the onset of trench warfare. The centre advanced thirteen
miles, crossing the rivers Ailette, Aisne and Vesle. As happened so often,
however, slower progress on the flanks resulted in the formation of a
vulnerable salient.
Paradoxically the very extent of Ludendorff’s tactical successes proved
an embarrassment. He had created two huge bulges and one smaller one
in the Allied front, leaving his armies a prey to counter-attack as their
impetus declined. The tide of battle began to turn in mid-July. On the
15th Ludendorff attacked near Reims but made little progress. Three
days later Petain, using masses of light tanks, counter-attacked on the
Marne, causing the Crown Prince to retreat to straighten his lines. The
planned offensive in Flanders was postponed, then abandoned. Gradually
the initiative passed to the Allies and Foch never again lost it.
After a most promising beginning Ludendorff had forfeited the second
and last chance of German victory in the west by persistently attacking
the strongest centre of resistance. Even more serious, ultimately, than
the physical losses sustained by Germany during these offensives was the
blow to morale when the ragged, undernourished attackers discovered the
Allied rear areas to be, by comparison with Germany, ‘ a land flowing with
milk and honey’ — or more literally with wine and bread. Disillusionment
and defeatism now began to spread. A falling-off in the Germans’ fighting
qualities became noticeable in the summer of 1918, particularly in the
increasing number who quietly surrendered. There was now real justifica-
tion for Haig’s previously unfounded belief that the end of the war was
in sight.
The Allied advance opened on 8 August with an inspiriting victory.
General Rawlinson’s 4th Army and the French 1st Army struck east of
Amiens and, using over 400 tanks, overwhelmed the forward German
divisions. The psychological effect was far-reaching for Ludendorff later
described this as ‘ the black day of the German army in the history of the
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war. . .it put the decline of our fighting power beyond all doubt’. Soon
afterwards he shocked the kaiser by advocating peace negotiations before
the situation deteriorated still further.
Foch now had sufficient manpower, artillery, ammunition and tanks
to prevent the enemy from consolidating. Blow now followed blow in
rapid succession; attacks which were checked were no longer pressed un-
profitably but were suspended and resumed only when the enemy had
been distracted elsewhere. The Germans now experienced the demoralis-
ing effects of steady if gradual retreat. By mid-September the Americans,
in their first battle as an independent army, had erased the St Mihiel
salient though at high cost; while the British 3rd and 4th Armies had
reached the formidable Hindenburg Line.
Haig’s unquenchable optimism now proved most valuable, for, un-
deterred by the doubts of French generals and the British government, he
remained convinced that the war could be ended that year. He attacked the
Hindenburg Line on 2 September, and after a week of skilful manoeuvr-
ing penetrated the defences on the strongest sector of the Canal du Nord.
The news of the cracking of the Hindenburg Line so alarmed the already
despondent Ludendorff that he suffered a breakdown and on recovering
urged the new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, to sue for an armistice at
once. This he did on 3 October. The defeatism of the military leaders
quickly infected the home front, so that, although the generals partially
recovered their confidence towards the end of October, it was by then too
late to rally the nation. The inexorable advance of the Allied armies
further undermined the will-power of the German government and
people. By the time the armistice was signed on 11 November, the
Germans had been ousted from western Belgium and only a fringe of
French territory remained in their hands. Foch was about to launch an
attack in Lorraine which would for the first time have carried the war on
to German soil.
It is tempting but scarcely possible to assign a precise order of importance
to the causes of Germany’s defeat. One problem is to weigh military
defeats against domestic defeatism ; or what is almost the same thing, the
attrition of Germany’s armies against the attrition of her people through
the blockade. Clearly it would be unrealistic to distinguish too sharply
between the home and military fronts: news of wretched conditions at
home sapped the soldiers’ will to fight ; while the defeatism of the revered
military leaders broke the last restraint against social revolution inside
Germany.
Another problem is to decide which, if any, of the war theatres pro-
duced the decisive victory. Chronologically ‘the Easterners’ appear to
have a strong case. In September 1918 the Salonika front was at last
opened up by General Franchet d’Esperey and paid dividends for the half-
million troops deposited there. Bulgaria capitulated on 30 September,
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and Turkey’s end was hastened by the exposure of Constantinople to
attack from Macedonia. In Palestine Allenby’s final offensive, assisted
by the Arabs under T. E. Lawrence’s unorthodox leadership, began on
19 September. Brilliant mobile operations led to the fall of Damascus and
Aleppo, and Turkey capitulated on 30 October. When the Austrians were
defeated in the Trentino and on the Venetian plain the ramshackle
Empire, which had endured remarkably well, at last disintegrated.
Austria sued for an armistice at the end of October and signed one on
4 November.
However, it is unlikely that it was chiefly the collapse of her allies that
caused Germany to surrender. Her military leaders had concentrated
their forces and their hopes on the western front, and it was Luden-
dorff’s failure to clinch victory between March and July that had led to
disillusionment. The loss of her allies probably served only to confirm a
foregone conclusion. Indeed the realisation by Austria — and even more
Bulgaria — in the summer of 1918 that Germany was no longer strong
enough to send reserves to their support probably accounts in part for
the slackening of their own resistance.
In retrospect it is easy to see that once the rival alliances went
to war in 1914 the consequence was likely to be a terribly wasteful
struggle of attrition. Recent military history, notably the American
Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War, suggested that the brief, decisive
battle was a thing of the past given opponents inspired by patriotic
fervour and with governments prepared to draw heavily on national
resources.
In these circumstances the natural tendency to blame the full horror for
the holocaust on the generals was misplaced ; in particular it was falsely
assumed that individuals could exercise strict control over the juggernauts.
Not surprisingly armies numbered in millions tended either to break
their nominal commanders — as with Moltke — or to submerge them in
the business of administration — as tended to happen with Haig. It is
noteworthy that generals who remained in high command in 1918 did
eventually reveal ability to conduct a war of manoeuvre — though only
Allenby had the advantage of terrain that permitted truly mobile opera-
tions.
Thus while criticism of particular campaigns and individuals’ short-
comings is legitimate it must be founded on what was practicable at the
time and not some ideal standard. Equally the generals’ pre-war education
— in the widest sense— must be taken into account, for in the long run
societies get the leaders they deserve. 1 The soldiers who rose to the
1 R. Wilkinson, The Prefects (London, Oxford University Press, 1964), especially pp. 77-
9 . 83-9. For the German military tradition see Karl Demeter, The German Officer-Corps
(London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).
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highest commands during the war were the elite of their profession ; many
had distinguished themselves before 1914 and a few were to do so in
civil life after 1918.
By the end of the war the domination of the defensive was at last being
challenged by new means of mobility, notably the tank, the motor
vehicle and the aeroplane. The war had produced potentially revolutionary
machines without as yet the techniques for their full exploitation. To these
half-spelt ‘lessons’ of the war reactions differed widely. The French
General Staff learnt too well the folly of their impetuosity, and in the
1920s fell back on a static defensive policy, epitomised by the construc-
tion of the Maginot Line. Britain, after pioneering the tank and leading
the way in military aviation, practically turned her back on these achieve-
ments in the 1920s, and returned to the pre-war tradition of amateurish
contempt for mechanisation. Germany, as might be expected of the loser,
showed most willingness to follow the military logic of the new ways of
warfare suggested by tanks and aircraft. By the mid- 1930s she was again
preparing to conduct a war of movement.
Dispassionately viewed in the context of world politics the war, though
uniquely wasteful in lives and material, was not strictly pointless, except
possibly for Germany, whose rise to industrial dominance in central
Europe was only delayed. Three historic Empires collapsed irreparably as
a direct consequence of military disasters, and from them new states were
created and old nations resurrected. France regained the provinces lost
in 1871, and Belgian independence was restored. The calamitous results
of the pre-war anarchy in international relations led to the brave experi-
ment of safeguarding international peace and justice through the creation
of the League of Nations.
From another viewpoint the European belligerents were all losers in
that the war marked — if it did not actually cause — a shifting of inter-
national power away from central Europe to North America on one side
and, less obviously, to Soviet Russia on the other. More directly the war
spread the infection of European nationalism to a wider world. Japan had
already tasted the triumph of nationalist victory in 1905, and her success-
ful participation in the war further encouraged her nationalist pride and
imperial ambitions. In India the sense of privileges fully earned by self-
sacrifice in the Imperial cause, and also the exposure of thousands of her
citizen-soldiers to Western conditions and ideas, combined to inspire a
new and more vigorous post-war phase in the movement for national
independence. Similar reactions were evident among the self-governing
Dominions, whose contribution to the Allied victory had been invaluable.
The Dominions’ war services gained them independent representation both
at the Peace Conference and in the League of Nations. Henceforth there
could be no question of Britain unilaterally committing them to un-
congenial policies — as Canada demonstrated in 1922 over the Chanak
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crisis with Turkey. The Great War was, in short, the matrix of the
Commonwealth.
Among the most ominous developments of the war were the deliberate
encouragement of nationalist hatred, the enlarged role of the press in
misleading the masses, and the raising of government-sponsored propa-
ganda to the status of a major instrument of war. 1
It was probably only in the last year of the war that Allied propaganda
exerted an important influence on enemy morale. Austria-Hungary with
its starving civilians and ragged, emaciated armies provided an excellent
target. Literature in all the languages of the Empire was showered from
aeroplanes on the enemy trenches and far behind the lines, stressing the
tyranny of Austrian rule and exploiting racial antagonism. The effect was
evident in the increased flow of deserters ; while a Congress of Suppressed
Nationalities held at Rome in April 1918 was warmly supported by the
Allied governments.
The British propaganda campaign was now brilliantly directed by Lord
Northcliffe, ably assisted by Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Informa-
tion. The leaflets dropped on Germany provided news which German
censorship withheld. Maps demonstrated the progress of the Allied
armies; the daily arrival of vast numbers of Americans in France was
stressed ; all the evils of the war were blamed on Prussian militarists ; and
hopes of a just peace were held out for a democratic Germany. By the end
of the war Britain alone was dropping 140,000 leaflets a day over German
lines. The Germans had been the first to use enemy propaganda but now
they had no answer to this ‘poison raining down from the sky’.
There is ample evidence— in the sudden slump in military morale, in
widespread strikes and demonstrations, and in political crises such as
Kiihlmann’s ‘defeatist’ speech in the Reichstag on 24 June 1918 — that
Allied propaganda played a decisive part both in breaking the German
armies and in fomenting a revolutionary situation inside Germany. When
Germany’s military failure could no longer be concealed the deluded
masses suffered a traumatic shock.
A massive propaganda campaign to strengthen one’s own morale and
cripple the enemy’s was inevitable in an unlimited war, and at least the
mixture of truth, lies and half-truths was less destructive than material
attrition. Nevertheless, it was obviously a two-edged weapon whose evil
effects could not be cut off with the armistice. Thus, for example, popular
war hysteria ruled out any possibility of a moderate, conciliatory peace
settlement in 1919; while Goebbels and others perfected and perverted
war-time propaganda methods to support even more loathsome racialist
policies in the inter-war years.
The neologism ‘home front’ aptly suggests the extent of civilian
1 F. P. Chambers, The War Behind the War 1914-1918 (London, Faber, 1939), pp. 494-
537 -
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involvement in the war. Even in Britain, with its laissez-faire and anti-
militarist traditions, the needs of war left few aspects of life undisturbed;
British Summer Time and restricted licensing hours were among the per-
manent legacies. The most significant general trends were in the direction
of strengthening the machinery of central government, extension of
government activity through new ministries, and the imposition of controls
that would have been unthinkable before 1914. Had the war stopped in
1916 a return to something like pre-war conditions might have been
possible, but the final two years saw a transformation of European society
which could not be reversed.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE PEACE SETTLEMENT OF VERSAILLES
1918-1933
At eleven o’clock on the morning of n November 1918 the cease-fire
jLA sounded along the western front. It was the end of the first world
1 -L war, which had killed not less than 10 million persons, had brought
down four great empires and had impoverished the continent of Europe.
The defeat of Germany, so long invincible to more than half the world,
had been registered at dawn that day in the Armistice of Compiegne.
Its heavy terms were in the main those proposed by Marshal Foch, the
Allied generalissimo, and lay between the views of the British Field-
Marshal Haig, who overestimated the German capacity for continued
resistance and advocated more lenient conditions, and those of the
American General Pershing, who had argued in favour of refusing an
armistice and maintaining the Allied advance. This matched the attitude
of the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a popular American
demand for unconditional surrender. As it was, one month after the
armistice, Ebert, head of the first government of the new German republic,
greeted returning German formations at the Brandenburger Tor with the
words: ‘No foe has overcome you. . .You have protected the homeland
from enemy invasion.’ 1
No less important in the long run than the terms of the armistice were
the preconditions governing its signature. When the German government
had applied to President Wilson on 4 October 1918 for an armistice it
had adroitly proposed that peace negotiations, and not only those for an
armistice, should be based upon the ‘fourteen points’ of his address of
8 January 1918, as amplified in his subsequent pronouncements. During
the preparatory Allied discussion of armistice terms in Paris and Versailles
at the end of October, the European Prime Ministers, Lloyd George,
Clemenceau and Orlando, along with Sonnino, Italian Foreign Minister,
were chary of committing themselves contractually to the frequent im-
precisions of the fourteen points. Lloyd George asked: ‘Should we not
make it clear to the German Government that we are not going in on the
Fourteen Points of peace? ’ 2 But Wilson’s harbinger and confidant, Colonel
House, threatened that, if they were refused as a basis, the United States
might abandon her associates and conclude a separate peace with the
enemy. By 5 November the American government was able to transmit to
the German government in the Lansing Note a declaration by the Allied
1 Friedrich Ebert, Schriften, Aufzeichnungen, Reden (Dresden, 1926), vol. n, pp. 127-8.
* Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (London, 1 926 f.), vol. iv, p. 1 67.
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powers of ‘their willingness to make peace with the Government of
Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President’s address to
Congress of January, 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in
his subsequent addresses’, 1 subject to two qualifications: first, the Allies
reserved complete discretion concerning the freedom of the seas (point II) —
an important success for Lloyd George against standing American resent-
ment of the British doctrine of blockade ; secondly, by the stipulation that
the invaded territories must be ‘restored’ (points VII, VIII and XI) the
Allies ‘understand that compensation will be made by Germany for
all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property
by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air’ 2 —
a category much narrower than the possible but unrealisable claim to the
whole of the direct cost of the war to the Allies, then estimated at around
£24,000 million. Such was the so-called Pre-armistice Agreement respecting
the fourteen points entered into in connection with the armistice with
Germany, but not with the earlier armistices with Bulgaria, Turkey and
Austria-Hungary, to which territories the points were largely relevant.
The Allied powers did not communicate to the German government
the authoritative American commentary on the fourteen points provided
by House, who, at the meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council on
29 October, pointed out that Wilson ‘ had insisted on Germany’s accepting
all his speeches, and from these you could establish almost any point that
anyone wished against Germany’. 8 Certainly the commentary rendered
the points rather more adaptable. For instance, the phrase ‘ open covenants
of peace, openly arrived at’ (point I) ‘was not meant to exclude confi-
dential diplomatic negotiations involving delicate matters’ 4 — Wilson had
explained this to the Senate. As regards the readjustment of Italian
frontiers ‘along clearly recognisable lines of nationality’ (point IX) it
was now suggested that ‘Italy should have her claim in the Trentino,
but that the northern part, inhabited by Germans, should be completely
autonomous’. 5
The American commentary likewise dealt gingerly with the ‘open-
minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’
(point V) and subsequently, in initiating the discussion upon them in the
first days of the peace conference, Wilson said that ‘he thought all were
agreed to oppose the restoration of the German Colonies’. 6 This principle,
welcome to the British Empire, was adopted at once by the Supreme
Council (24 January 1919) and later discussion turned upon its applica-
1 British and Foreign State Papers (H.M. Stationery Office, London), vol. cxi, p. 650.
2 Ibid. p. 651.
2 David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties (London, 1938), vol. 1, p, 80.
4 Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918: Supplement / (State
Department, Washington, 1933), vol. 1, p. 405. 6 Ibid. p. 410.
* Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: the Paris Peace Conference
1919 (Washington, 1942 f.), vol. ni, p. 718. Hereafter cited as The Paris Peace Conference
W9-
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tion, notably the form and attribution of mandates, the new instruments
of trusteeship under the League of Nations (see ch. ix), whereby Allied
powers took over the outlying territories of the German and Turkish
empires. In this latter connection Lloyd George had already, at a brief
Allied conference in London at the beginning of December 1918, used the
great preponderance of British forces in the Turkish theatre to obtain
Clemenceau’s verbal agreement, honourably kept, to modify to British
advantage the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 for the disposal of
the Turkish Empire ; Palestine, which was to have been under international
control, would now pass under British, and oil-bearing Mosul was to be
transferred from the French to the British sphere of influence. The British
Prime Minister also secured Allied recognition of the right of the battle-
tested British Dominions to send delegates to the peace conference. Lloyd
George was compelled, indeed, to concede what Castlereagh in like
circumstance a century earlier had withheld, namely, his agreement that
the freedom of the seas might be discussed ; but when the conference came
Wilson tactfully submerged this vexed issue of neutral rights under cover
of his quest for a League of Nations without neutrals, in what he termed
a ‘ practical joke on myself’. 1 Thus at the outset Lloyd George, reinforced
by a fresh mandate from the British electorate in the Coupon Election of
December 1918, had skilfully secured a strong position for Britain and
had set her on the way towards obtaining much, if not most, of what she
mainly aimed at on and across the seas as regards the suppression of the
German fleet and colonies, the doctrine of blockade, her economic and
strategic position in the Middle East on the route to India, and her con-
stitutional evolution of empire.
If the initial position of Britain was stronger than that of the hard-tried
continental allies, France and Italy, stronger again was that of America
away across the Atlantic. It was, indeed, the strongest in the world. The
United States, unlike the European allies, emerged from the war not
poorer but much richer, with the others heavily indebted to her not only
in gratitude for precious aid but also in hard cash to the extent of about
£2,000 million. At the same time many Americans tended to think of
themselves, despite their participation in the war, as impartially aloof
from the rapacious feuds of old Europe. This attitude found divergent
expressions, on the one hand in the isolationism of Senator Borah of the
Republican party, and on the other in the idealism of President Wilson,
the leader of the Democrats. His aspiration towards a finer ordering of
international society had sent a thrill of hope through the war-weary
world. It seemed that here at last was the old ideal of the philosopher-
prince new-made in a professorial president with the power as well as
the purpose to lead mankind into a more generous future. America
1 President Wilson, speech at San Diego, 19 September 1919: Addresses of President
Wilson (66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document No. 120: Washington, 1919), p. 278.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
appeared the richest nation both in substance and in spirit so that even the
old Tiger, cynical Clemenceau, believed or said he believed that she ‘had
opened a new and more splendid ethical era’. 1
International relations were now to take an exciting jump ahead into
the League of Nations. This was largely, though not entirely, done under
Wilson’s influence and he was the focus of expectation when he landed in
Europe on 13 December 1918, the only head of a state who was, unwisely
as many thought, to be a delegate to the Peace Conference of Paris.
Preliminary meetings of the conference began a month later and it was
formally opened in plenary session on 18 January 1919. Twenty-five
allied and associated nations from the five continents were represented
at this inauguration of the first peace ‘congress of the world’ (Wilson).
The delay in starting the conference was scarcely excessive considering
the unexpected suddenness with which the war had ended; but once
begun the conference, and specifically the Council of Ten comprising two
representatives each of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (British
Empire, France, Italy, Japan, United States), still delayed in getting to
grips with the main issues. Not only were the negotiators reluctant to
show their hands too early but, instead of being able to concentrate upon
the chief problems, the delegates discovered that they constituted ‘a cabi-
net of the nations ’ (Lloyd George) subject to the pressure of current events.
From the beginning the massive phenomenon of the Russian revolution
loomed up behind the conference, as was indicated within its first week
by the abortive Prinkipo Proposal. 2 In Berlin the Socialist government had
indeed just crushed the Spartakist extremists by turning against them the
militaristic free-corps, the beginning of the disappointment of the keen
ambition of Lenin’s Russia to promote a Communist take-over in Germany.
This critical failure was to be reinforced by the suppression of the Soviet
republics which were shortly to arise in Bavaria and Hungary. That,
though, still lay ahead. For the present a wave of strikes further diminished
confidence and dislocated the enfeebled economy of Europe, especially in
Italy and England. In France, with her northern coalfields wantonly devas-
tated by the Germans, coal production in 1919 was reckoned to be about
40 per cent of that in 1 9 1 3 . Furthermore, throughout the world, an epidemic
of virulent influenza killed about twice as many people as the war had done.
1 Conversation of 9 November 1918 with House, as reported by the latter: The Paris
Peace Conference 1919, vol. I, p. 344.
2 Lloyd George, who had personally advocated a hearing for Soviet Russia at the peace
conference, hopefully proposed that all the warring factions in Russia should be called
upon to observe ‘a truce of God’ and to be represented at a special conference to try to
resolve the conflict under Allied auspices. Lloyd George was supported by President Wilson
who drafted the Allied invitation of 22 January 1919 to attend such a conference at the
Princes Islands, Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmora. This venue reflected Clemenceau’s
refusal to have Soviet representatives in Paris. With French encouragement the White
Russian authorities refused to have dealings with the Soviets, who for their part sent an
insufficient and insulting acceptance. Thus the experimental Prinkipo Proposal came to
nothing, and the allies in Paris were left to debate the uneasy pros and cons of further
intervention in Russia.
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Sickly Europe was short not only of coal and other raw materials, but
also of food. Much was done here by the American Relief Administration
under the influential Hoover, who became head of the Food Section of
the Supreme Economic Council, judiciously constituted on 8 February
1919 by the Council of Ten in order to co-ordinate such organs as the
short-lived Supreme Council for Supply and Relief, the Allied Blockade
Council and the Allied Maritime Transport Council, and to correspond
in some measure to the Supreme War Council on the military side. The
Council of Ten was itself preoccupied about that time with executive
matters of military and economic detail in connection with the renewal
of the armistice with Germany and the relaxation of the blockade, which
it had specifically maintained. The thirty-six-day Armistice of Compi&gne,
finally renewed at Trier on 16 February 1919, had been provisionally
renewed on 13 December 1918 and again on 16 January 1919 when it was
stipulated that ‘in order to secure the provisioning of Germany and of
the rest of Europe’ 1 the German merchant fleet should be placed under
Allied control for the duration of the armistice without prejudice to its
final disposal, and under promise of ‘suitable compensation’ for its use.
This was one of the additional demands which the Allies saw fit to make.
These ‘ aggravations of the armistice ’ (Wilson) understandably incurred
some moral criticism, but the demand for the German merchant fleet
was, in view of the general shortage of tonnage caused by the German
submarine campaign, a reasonable provision to facilitate the relaxation
of the blockade in execution of the declaration in the original armistice
convention that the Allies ‘contemplate the provisioning of Germany
during the armistice as shall be found necessary’. 2 The grim hunger in
Germany was less severe than in some other parts of central Europe, but
on 17 January the Allies declared their willingness to permit Germany
to import a first instalment of 270,000 tons of food if the merchantmen
were handed over forthwith. The German government, however, now
refused to do so before it had received an Allied guarantee of specified
deliveries. Complex negotiations ensued concerning terms of delivery
and methods of payment. The French authorities, intent as ever upon
German reparation for German devastation, were reluctant to allow
Germany to pay in gold but were overborne by the forceful intervention
of Lloyd George at a meeting of the Council of Ten on 8 March which
led to the solution of the question six days later in the Brussels Agree-
ment for the provisioning of Germany. Thereafter the food blockade of
Germany was relaxed until it was finally raised on 12 July 1919 in con-
sequence of her ratification of the peace treaty.
On the same day as the Brussels Agreement, 14 March, Wilson returned
1 British and Foreign State Papers, vol. cxn, p. 899.
2 Ibid. vol.cxi,p.6i9.EnglishtranslationofoffirialFrenchtextasinH. W. V. Temperley,
A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London, 1920 f.), vol. 1, p. 468,
213 16-3
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
to Paris after a month’s absence. For as soon as the draft covenant of the
League of Nations had been completed and laid before the full conference
on 14 February he had left for Washington to face his critics in the Senate,
where there was a Republican majority, before Congress adjourned.
Wilson’s concentration on the League of Nations was not, however, the
only, or even perhaps the chief, psychological factor which combined with
executive distractions to delay the primary task of concluding peace with
Germany. For many, including keen young experts on the British and
American delegations, the main interest lay less in the stem reckoning with
Germany than in the benevolent creation of new nationalities like the
Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs in fulfilment of war-time Allied propaganda
which had made of their liberation an idealistic war-aim such as Anglo-
Saxon peoples generously crave. The time of the Council of Ten was much
taken up with wearisome hearings of Central European and Near Eastern
delegates and as late as 17 March Wilson ‘insisted that peace should be
made simultaneously with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and
Turkey’. 1 This impractical attitude was supported by Italy for practical
reasons of self-interest in the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
It was partially reflected in the constitution, early in February, of the terri-
torial commissions of the conference. There were commissions for Czecho-
slovak affairs, for Polish affairs, for Rumanian and Yugoslav affairs,
for Greek and Albanian affairs, for Belgian and Danish affairs, but none
specifically for German or Austrian affairs. Nor was this deficiency very
satisfactorily remedied by the creation at the end of the month of the
co-ordinating Central Territorial Committee and of later committees for
considering enemy representations.
The effective improvement in organisation came in the last week of
March when the Council of Ten contracted into the more secret and in-
formal Council of Four, much as a century earlier at the Congress of
Vienna the Committee of Eight had been effectively superseded by the
Committee of Five. And on 25 March Lloyd George presented in his
Fontainebleau Memorandum the first conspective review of the salient
problems of peacemaking. At last they were hammered out between the
four of them: Clemenceau, very old, in suede gloves, Wilson who ‘ believed
in mankind but . . . distrusted all men ’, 2 Lloyd George who ‘ argued like
a sharpshooter’, 3 and Orlando, the only one who did not speak English.
Subordinate to the Council of Four there was constituted a council of
foreign ministers or Council of Five; and indeed Wilson and Clemenceau,
more even than Lloyd George, did treat their respective Foreign Ministers,
Lansing and Pichon, strictly as subordinates.
The conference now reached its crux over the claims of France in that
1 Note by Colonel House : Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. rv, p. 401 .
2 Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, vol. 1, p. 234.
Andre Tardieu, La Paix (Paris, 1921), p 113.
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Rhineland region disputed between Frenchmen and Germans since the
middle kingdom of Lothair was cast up in the wreck of Charlemagne’s
empire more than a thousand years before. The main French claims,
already advanced in their clearest form in 1917, were two: first, that
‘Alsace and Lorraine must be restored to us not in the mutilated condition
in which they were left by the treaty of 1815, but with the frontiers as
they existed before 1790. We shall thus have the geographic and mineral
basin of the Saar’; 1 secondly, the French government ‘desire to see the
territory to the west of the Rhine separated from the German Empire
and erected into something in the nature of a buffer state’ 2 against their
more prolific German neighbours who had invaded France twice in one
lifetime, in Clemenceau's. Wilson and Lloyd George opposed these
claims, being rightly afraid of repeating in reverse Germany’s provocation
in annexing Alsace-Lorraine. Concentrated negotiation brought a sensible
settlement by mid-April. It was decided that the territory of the Saar valley
should be slightly enlarged and placed under a special administration of
the League of Nations for fifteen years, after which its sovereignty should
be determined by plebiscite; the mines of the Saar basin were given to
France in compensation for her ruined coalfields. Clemenceau reluctantly
and to the dismay of President Poincare and Marshal Foch abandoned
the demand for a buffer territory in return for three guarantees of security:
first, a military guarantee by Great Britain and the United States of im-
mediate assistance to France in the event of German unprovoked aggres-
sion; secondly, the demilitarisation of the west bank of the Rhine and of
a fifty-kilometre belt on the east bank ; thirdly. Allied occupation of the
west bank and bridgeheads in three zones, one of which might be evacuated
each five years up to fifteen years, or sooner if Germany had before then
completely fulfilled her obligations. Wilson and Lloyd George were especi-
ally doubtful about Allied occupation but finally on 1 5 April Wilson agreed.
That same day Clemenceau, in the presence of his friend House, instructed
his secretary that the French press must cease its jeering attacks upon the
thin-skinned president. They promptly ended. It was commonly supposed
that this was more than coincidence and that Wilson had stooped to a
disillusioning bargain. Meanwhile Lloyd George was temporarily absent
in London; he did not much like the Wilson-Clemenceau agreement on
occupation that he found upon return, but consented to it on 22 April.
Already on 18 April the German government had received an invitation
to send plenipotentiaries to Versailles and on 7 May the draft treaty of
peace was there communicated to Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, German
Foreign Minister. Initially the general idea had been that some sort of
‘preliminary peace conference’ of the Allied powers would serve as a
1 French note of 12 January 1917: Papers respecting Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact,
Cmd. 2169 of 1924, p. 2.
2 Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, to the British Ambassador in Paris in connection with
the foregoing note, 2 July 1917, ibid. pp. 3-4.
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prelude to a full congress, which might include enemy delegates. Here,
however, there prevailed even more than the usual haziness over pro-
cedure. For instance, Balfour had spoken in February of ‘ the final military
proposals’, which had originated in connection with renewing the armis-
tice, as facilitating ‘an important instalment of the Preliminary Peace’. 1
When nearly a month later the first report from a territorial commission,
the Polish, was under discussion Lloyd George asked ‘ whether the Council
proposed to define the frontiers of Germany finally on ex parte evidence
alone. The other side had not been heard. It was not only a question of
fairness to Germany but of establishing a lasting peace in Europe.’ 2 But
the idea of hearing the Germans before the treaty was in draft receded into
the background, and when the first meeting did come on 7 May it was
inauspicious. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau spoke sitting, unlike Clemenceau
who preceded him, and said: ‘We know the force of the hatred which
confronts us here, and we have heard the passionate demand that the
victors should both make us pay as vanquished and punish us as guilty.
We are required to admit that we alone are war- guilty; such an admission
on my lips would be a lie.’ 3
In his preceding speech Clemenceau had given the German plenipoten-
tiaries fifteen days, subsequently prolonged by a week, in which to present
observations in writing upon the draft terms. There followed a spate of
German memoranda, often skilfully, sometimes speciously, argued. The
main arguments were that ‘the exactions of this treaty are more than
the German people can bear’ 4 and that in many respects they were in
contradiction with the stipulated fourteen points. This comeback jolted
the British representatives, who for one thing had tended, with their Allied
colleagues, to compile the treaty piecemeal without always appreciating
the heavy sum of the provisions. (‘Instead of drawing the picture with
big lines, they are drawing it like an etching’, commented House.) 5 Also,
the fourteen points had sometimes been rather lost from sight since Wilson
had failed to follow them up with a detailed plan and had transferred
his enthusiasm to the League of Nations, thus relaxing the American
diplomatic initiative which House had secured at the armistice. Now,
however, it was apparent that on some questions the Germans could
make out ‘an awkward case’, as Balfour remarked at the session in
Paris on 1-2 June of the British Imperial Cabinet at which the German
observations were considered. A sincere and honourable desire to deal
justly with Germany and a fear of renewed hostilities, if Germany should
refuse the terms, combined to render the cabinet unanimous in charging
the British Prime Minister to exert strong pressure to secure large con-
1 The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. rv, p. 86.
s Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, vol. n, p. 984.
8 The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. m, p. 417.
4 Ibid. vol. vi, p. 795.
s Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. IV, p. 418.
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cessions to Germany. These were resisted not only by Clemenceau but
also by Wilson, who complained that the British were now afraid of the
‘things that they insisted upon at the time of the writing of the treaty;
that makes me very sick. . .They are all unanimous, if you please, in their
funk. Now that makes me very tired.’ 1
Nevertheless Lloyd George surpassed Wilson on occasions, and now
obtained important modifications. Back in March he had already secured
the revision of the Polish Commission’s territorial proposals, which were
unduly drastic towards Germany according to the Wilsonian principle of
ethnic self-determination; now he returned to the charge. Besides obtain-
ing further modifications of the Polish frontier in Germany’s favour, he
overcame Wilson's reluctance to apply the process of self-determination
to Upper Silesia, and met one of Germany’s chief and legitimate grievances
by insisting upon a plebiscite there instead of outright cession to Poland.
Lloyd George failed, however, to surmount Clemenceau’s refusal to
reduce the fifteen-year period of allied occupation in the Rhineland. Nor
did he get very far in his enlightened plea for the early admission to the
League of Nations of Germany, who had offered to surrender the per-
mitted remnant of her navy if this were granted her forthwith. Popular
passions here as elsewhere complicated the task of the democratic peace-
makers who, unlike their predecessors at Vienna, worked under the direct
pressure of powerful criticism in press and parliament. It was the same
with the question of reparation, concerning which Lloyd George had been
instructed by the cabinet to aim at a modification ‘in the direction of
fixing the liability of the Germans to the Allies at a definite amount ’ 8 in
place of the stipulation that the Allied Reparation Commission, which
was to supervise the execution of Germany’s financial obligations, would
inform Germany by i May 1921 of her total liability.
Other things being equal, there was evident advantage, as the American
delegation urged, in inserting the total in the treaty, and in the subsequent
event its execution was gravely prejudiced by adding a delay in fixing
the figure to the inevitable delay in paying a great indemnity. But other
things were not equal. Lloyd George was well aware that Germany’s
capacity to pay was limited and furthermore that she must mainly pay by
exports which would be particularly liable to injure the trade of her
industrial competitor, Britain, stripped by war of foreign markets which
had underpinned her nineteenth-century supremacy. The British Prime
Minister, however, was saddled with his electioneering assurance that
Germany ‘must pay to the uttermost farthing’, and he did not want to
let his Conservative supporters ‘throw him’ on this issue. 3 Politics took
1 Wilson at a meeting of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, 3 June 1919
(stenographic report): The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. xi, p. 222.
1 Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, vol. 1, p. 719.
* Lloyd George to Colonel House, 6 March 1919: Seth P. Tillman, Anglo-American
Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton, 1961), p. 239.
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precedence over economics so that Lloyd George argued in the Council of
Four that ‘if figures were given now they would frighten rather than
reassure the Germans. Any figure that would not frighten them would be
below the figure with which he and M. Clemenceau could face their peoples
in the present state of public opinion’: 1 time, he now hoped, would pro-
mote moderation.
The British share in reparation would, under the terms of the Lansing
Note, have been exiguous except for shipping had it not been that British
argument, largely, and in particular by the memorandum of 31 March
1919 by high-minded General Smuts of South Africa, had secured the in-
clusion of service pensions and allowances in the category of damage done
to civilians. Under cover of dubious reasoning which tarnished the Allied
reputation, Germany’s liability was thus at least doubled from somewhere
about £2,000-3,000 million, which was what the British Treasury and Board
of Trade had estimated that she could and should pay, to the much more
uncertain region upwards of £6,000 million. The German delegation had
in its observations mentioned the impressive-looking figure of £5,000 mil-
lion as a possible maximum, but subject to such far-reaching conditions
as the retention of colonies and foreign assets and to such technical quali-
fications that the amount actually to be paid would have been reduced out
of recognition. This was considered an insidious and unacceptable offer.
The provision for the determination of Germany’s liability by 1 May 1921
was maintained, though Lloyd George secured agreement on 10 June that
Germany might submit to the Allies within four months of the signature
of the treaty any proposals for payment she chose to make in the way of
offering either a lump sum, or labour and materials or ‘any practicable
plan’. 2 Germany did not avail herself of this concession.
The vigorous and voluminous Allied reply of 16 June to the German
observations, while mainly controverting them, bore witness to the British
initiative not only as regards reparation and Upper Silesia but also in
a number of minor concessions to Germany as to the Pomeranian frontier,
purchase of Silesian coal, the rate of German disarmament and, for in-
stance, the international control of Germany’s main waterways, which
was a feature of the treaty. This Allied note gave Germany five days,
subsequently extended to seven, in which to signify her acceptance of
the revised treaty, failing which the armistice would lapse and the Allies
would ‘take such steps as they think needful to enforce their terms’. 3
These steps were to be in the first instance an advance in ‘two bounds’
by thirty-nine Allied divisions from the Rhine to the Weser and up the
valley of the Main with the object of severing southern from northern
Germany. Foch was authorised ‘to commence his advance immediately
1 Meeting of 9 June 1919: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. vi, p. 261.
! Allied reply of 16 June 1919 to the German observations: British and Foreign State
Papers, vol. cxil, p. 285. 3 Ibid. vol. cxn, p. 253.
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on the expiration of the armistice’ 1 at seven o’clock on the evening of
23 June 1919. Meanwhile there was passionate opposition in Germany
to the terms, and a cabinet crisis whereby Bauer became Chancellor in
place of Scheidemann, who declared that the hand that signed such a
treaty must wither. On 22 June the Supreme Council shook the new
German government by rejecting its offer to sign under specific reserve
as to those articles (227-31) concerning German war-guilt and the sur-
render of Germans accused of war crimes. On the morning of 23 June
the Supreme Council, incensed by the scuttling two days previously of
the German battle-fleet interned at Scapa Flow, refused a German request
for a further 48-hour extension of the time limit. The Supreme Council
was again in session at five o’clock that afternoon, having not yet received
a German reply. The meeting concluded during an observation by Balfour,
recorded as follows by the adept secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey: ‘As
to squeezing the Germans. . .(At this point M. Dutasta, followed by
Colonel Henri and Captain Portier, entered the room, with a note from
the German Delegation expressing willingness on behalf of the German
Republic to sign, under compulsion, a dishonourable peace. . .Orders
were given for guns to be fired. No further discussion took place).’ 2
At twelve minutes past three on the afternoon of 28 June 1919 in the
Galerie des Glaces at Versailles the German plenipotentiaries signed the
great treaty of 440 articles and sealed the defeat of that Second German
Empire which had been inaugurated in the same room, in victory, not
fifty years before. And it was five years to a day since the assassination at
Sarajevo.
By the Treaty of Versailles Germany in the west ceded to Belgium the
small districts of Eupen and Malmedy subject to conditions concerning
popular consultation, and returned to France the Alsace-Lorraine of
1870, accepting also the provisions with regard to the Saar and the Rhine-
land. In the south Germany ‘acknowledges and will respect strictly the
independence of Austria’ (article 80); the old frontier with the Austro-
Hungarian Empire was retained with the minor exception of a wedge in
Upper Silesia ceded to the new Czechoslovakia. In the east Germany con-
ceded to reconstituted Poland a roughly ethnic frontier giving her Posen
and West Prussia with a corridor to the Baltic on the eighteenth-century
model in fulfilment of the stipulation in the fourteen points that Poland
‘should be assured a free and secure access to the sea’ (point XIII). In
this connection the German port of Danzig was constituted an outlet for
Poland as a free city under the auspices of the League of Nations, but
with no provision for subsequent revision as in the case of the Saar.
On the other side of East Prussia, Germany lost Memel, which eventually
1 Decision of the Council of Four, 20 June 1919: E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler,
Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939 (H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1946 f.).
First Series, vol. 1, p. 18. 2 Loc. cit.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
passed to Lithuania. Plebiscites were to determine the attribution of
Upper Silesia and of the East Prussian districts of Allenstein and Marien-
werder: the provisions regarding Silesia and Marienwerder, as for Danzig,
were substituted largely at British instance for originally proposed cessions
to Poland. The outcome of the plebiscites, held under Allied administra-
tion, justified the British stand. Allenstein and Marienwerder were assigned
almost entire to Germany as a result of overwhelming votes in July 1920,
and in the Silesian plebiscite in March 1921 Germany secured approxi-
mately 60 per cent of the votes against 40 for Poland. The consequent
division of Upper Silesia provoked a Polish insurrection under Korfanty
and acute Anglo-French dissension before an award by the League of
Nations in October 1921 partitioned the territory so that the smaller,
but economically much the richer, part went to Poland. This difficult
award satisfied neither party, but then the whole determination of Ger-
many’s eastern frontier on ethnic lines was highly complex, and in the
main a creditably fair compromise was achieved. This did not, however,
prevent especial resentment in Germany against a frontier which afforded
so much to the hated Poles. The Silesian difficulty did not arise comparably
in Schleswig since for that borderland the treaty specifically provided for
a plebiscite to be held in two zones, the northern of which went to Den-
mark and the southern to Germany. In all, Germany lost, including
Alsace-Lorraine, about 13} per cent of her territory, a roughly similar
proportion of her economic productivity, and a little over 10 per cent of her
population, some seven millions. She also lost all her colonies — a notable
severity — all her merchant vessels over 1,600 tons gross and half those
between 1,600 and 1,000 tons.
The Treaty of Versailles further provided for the disarmament of Ger-
many. Conscription there was abolished, chiefly at the instance of Lloyd
George against Foch, who saw danger in the resultant professional army,
consequently limited to a mere 100,000 men. This miniature force was
deprived of heavy artillery and tanks. The German navy was reduced to
minor proportions, without submarines, and an air force was forbidden.
(Wilson, however, had insisted, against the majority recommendation of
the Aeronautical Commission of the peace conference, upon Germany’s
being permitted a civil aviation.) The disarmament was to be supervised
by inter-allied commissions of control. The former German emperor
was arraigned ‘for a supreme offence against international morality’
(article 227), but the Netherlands persistently refused to surrender him
from his neutral asylum. Article 228 bound the German government to
hand over for trial before Allied military tribunals all persons accused of
complicity in the atrocities wherewith Germans had smirched their conduct
of the war. The German government from the first did its utmost to evade
this obligation and ultimately twelve accused were tried by the German
Supreme Court at Leipzig. There they were either acquitted or received
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such inadequate sentences that in January 1922 an Allied juridical Com-
mission of enquiry recommended that the remaining accused be handed
over for trial by the Allies. They, however, let the matter drop.
The other article which aroused the fiercest German resentment was
the so-called ‘war-guilt clause’ whereby ‘the Allied and Associated
Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany
and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied
and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected
as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of
Germany and her allies’ (article 231). The Allies not unnaturally did
consider this to be an affirmation of the truth, but it was intended to
establish the potential extent of German responsibility in its financial
bearing before proceeding to limit that financial liability along the lines
of the Lansing Note. The article had been drafted, largely by the young
American expert, John Foster Dulles, with the intention of achieving a
compromise between the American viewpoint, adhering to the Note, and
that of France and Great Britain, resigning themselves to its limitations.
It was German propaganda which expatiated upon moral war-guilt in
connection with an article which provoked no equivalent outcry from
Austria or Hungary. The reparation settlement with Germany which this
article introduced was as indicated, and included the short-term provision
that, pending the fixing of the total liability by 1 May 1921, Germany
should pay the equivalent of £1,000 million from which, however, there
were to be deducted the expenses of the Allied armies of occupation and,
with Allied approval, such supplies of food and raw material as they might
judge ‘to be essential to Germany to meet her obligations for reparation’
(article 235).
Such were the main, but far from the entire, terms of the Treaty of
Versailles. They were a severe imposition upon the new democratic
regime of Weimar which had been stimulated in its origin by Wilson’s
objection before the armistice to treating with representatives of ‘arbitrary
power’. But, as Wilson said, ‘the real case was that justice had shown
itself overwhelmingly against Germany’. 1 That was the central verdict
which most Germans would not accept, that and the sheer fact of defeat.
They developed a telling propaganda against the treaty, bringing out
wherever possible its inconsistencies, real and alleged, with the fourteen
points. Attention was averted from the greedy and vindictive war aims
which German arms had endeavoured to secure. In the peacemaking of
the Allies, though, the measure of their good intentions was that they
had sincerely adopted so high a standard in the first instance, and that a
reproachful propaganda based upon it should have made them, as it did,
apologetic. Seldom indeed has so stringent a treaty been framed with
1 Meeting of Council of Four, 3 June 1919: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. vi,
p. 159.
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such idealistic intent, a dichotomy which suggested to its prescient French
critic, Bainville, that it was ‘too mild for its severity’. 1 The opening for
charges of Allied hypocrisy over a dictated peace was widened by the
mismanagement of concluding an armistice with the enemy negotiated
upon ambiguous terms and then, after permitting him to state his case
in writing, indeed, but not in oral negotiation, imposing upon him the
allied rendering of those terms.
The full significance of the peace can only be appreciated, however,
if the settlement of Versailles be extended to embrace the treaties of
peace with Austria (St Germain-en-Laye, io September 1919), Bulgaria
(Neuilly, 27 November 1919) and Hungary (Trianon, 4 June 1920). This
last was delayed first by a Hungarian lapse into Communism under
Bela Kun(2i March- 1 August 1919) and then by the ensuing Rumanian
occupation of Budapest, which provoked admonitions from the Council
of Heads of Delegations. These ‘lawful heirs of the Council of Four’
(Balfour, the British representative) toiled on for the second half of the
peace conference, from the signature of the Treaty of Versailles until its
entry into force on 10 January 1920; they mainly completed what Balfour
called ‘the immense operation of liquidating the Austrian Empire’. 2
The resultant map of Europe was startlingly different from the old one.
The empire was parcelled out among half a dozen ‘succession states’.
The German remnant of Austria became a top-heavy and economically
precarious state of under 6 $ million inhabitants of whom nearly a third
were concentrated in Vienna. Austria lost the South Tyrol to Italy but
retained Klagenfurt by plebiscite and was awarded the Burgenland, where,
however, Hungary managed to wrest back Sopron. Hungary was to lose
most of all by dismemberment in obedience to self-determination ; Croatia
and Slovenia went, along with Bosnia and Herzegovina, to join with Serbia
and later Montenegro in the new Yugoslavia; in the north Hungary
yielded Slovakia, including a Magyar minority, to the new Czechoslovak
republic, and in the east Transylvania, including another and less avoid-
able Magyar minority, to Rumania. (Here, as elsewhere, special arrange-
ments were concluded to protect the rights of national minorities under
the supervision of the League of Nations — see ch. ix.) Rumania was
further aggrandised by gains in the Banat, Bukovina and, uneasily from
Russia, in Bessarabia. This expansion could be mainly justified by ethnic
arguments but they were scarcely applicable to Rumanian retention of
the Dobrudja at the expense of Bulgaria, who was also to lose to Greece
her Thracian outlet to the Aegean. If Rumania did well from the settle-
ment so did Poland, back on the map after more than a century of sup-
1 ‘Une paix trop douce pour ce qu’elle a de dur’ — 8 May 1919: Jacques Bainville,
L'AUemagne (Paris, 1939), p. 250.
2 Meeting of the Council of Heads of Delegations, i9August 1919: Woodward and Butler,
Documents on British Foreign Policy, First Series, vol. 1, p. 432.
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pression. Having gained from Germany in the west, she now, with pent-up
chauvinism, pushed out her frontiers in the east beyond the Curzon Line
to include Eastern Galicia and adjacent territories after she had defeated
the Soviet drive on Warsaw in the summer of 1920 : a further critical failure
of the revolutionary designs of Russia to the west. In the following autumn
General Zeligowski’s raid snatched Vilna from the Lithuanians and pre-
sented the great Allied powers with another Polish accomplished fact;
they eventually sanctioned both these Polish gains in March 1923. The
Polish dispute with Czechoslovakia over Teschen had been settled for the
time being by an Allied award of 28 July 1920 partitioning the little duchy
and thereby adding a small Polish minority to the Czech, Slovak, German,
Hungarian and Ruthenian national groups which combined to make
Czechoslovakia an ominous miniature of the defunct Habsburg monarchy.
Such, most briefly, was the balkanisation of central Europe with which
the peacemakers were later reproached, not with full justice. For the
settlement did, despite shortcomings, unravel a horrid tangle of conflicting
claims and considerations broadly according to fresh concepts of ethnic
self-determination. This principle was not, indeed, the invariable panacea
which people then tended to suppose : much depended for instance upon
the size and choice of the units selected for self-determination. Yet its
strength in general was suggested by the way that the network of new
frontiers on the whole survived the fluctuations of time; and where they
were later altered it was not always for the better. Furthermore, the main
features of this new national determination were already present when the
settlement came to be drafted, since 1918-19 marked the disruptive success
throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire of that national-liberal uprising
which had been damped down seventy years before. Thus the responsi-
bility of the great Allies might be held to lie less in their peacemaking
than in their war-time propaganda which had so successfully preached
the empire’s dissolution. Nor were the drafters of the settlement so un-
mindful of wider economic considerations as was sometimes supposed.
On 26 August 1919, for instance, they discussed a proposal involving
‘a customs union from Danzig to Sicily’. Balfour remarked, however,
that ‘the proposal of establishing an entirely new customs system over
half Europe alarmed him’. 1 And American opposition thwarted initiatives
by Britain and other European Allies towards reviewing the economic
position of Europe as a whole in relation to America, especially as regards
currency, and drawing upon the experience of the Supreme Economic
Council to constitute subsequent organs of economic co-operation.
The settlement did, however, contain elements of inherent weakness,
especially as regards the main flaw in the logical application of self-
determination. For while this doctrine was applied to Germany’s detriment
1 Woodward and Butler, Documents on British Foreign Policy, First Series, vol. i,
pp- 547 - 9 -
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in Poland and elsewhere she was not allowed the benefit of it in the
Sudetenland and Austria, where on 12 November 1918 the German-
Austrian Republic had been constituted specifically as ‘a component part
of the German Republic’, and claiming to include the Sudetenland.
Article 80 of the Treaty of Versailles, matched in that of Saint Germain,
did not prevent the framers of the new Weimar Constitution from pro-
viding for consultative Austrian participation in the German parliament
preceding Austria’s ‘junction with the German Reich’ (article 61). On
22 September 1919 Germany was accordingly compelled by the Allies
to sign a declaration nullifying any article in the constitution which
conflicted with the treaty. It would have been exceedingly difficult for
the Allies to sanction such fresh additions to German territory and power
but, as it was, Germany was left with a sense of injustice that could appeal
to the victors’ own principle of self-determination: a moral weakness in
the Allied position which found its lodgment within twenty years.
Lloyd George had written in his Fontainebleau Memorandum: ‘I can-
not conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people,
who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and
powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small
States, many of them consisting of people who have never previously
set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing
large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land.’ 1
Yet that was just what Lloyd George and his colleagues found it impossible
to avoid. Smuts had written earlier, in 1918: ‘Europe is being liquidated,
and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate.’ 2 It was
a heavy heritage for so new and experimental an authority.
The unfashionable balance of power had broken down. The Concert of
Europe had contracted by the autumn of 1919 to an uneasy western alli-
ance. Attempts were then being made in Paris to strengthen this affiance
by promoting the co-ordination of Belgian and Dutch defence against any
eventual renewal of German aggression. This preoccupation already under-
lay the deliberations of the Commission for the revision of the treaties of
1839, of that ‘scrap of paper’ tom up by the German invasion of Belgium
in 1914. Within two months of the signature of peace a British military
representative informed members of this commission that the danger for
Belgium of a repetition seemed to him ‘to be chiefly for the time when
Germany should have been able to arm herself anew and perhaps con-
clude an alliance with Russia, which might give birth to a rival of the
League of Nations. This danger could not, however, arise for twenty or
thirty years . . . The fact that the French frontier had been retraced towards
the north along the Rhine made it more and more necessary for Germany
to attack in Limburg. Germany would, therefore, become . . . more liable
1 Papers respecting Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact, Cmd. 2169 of 1924, p. 77.
2 Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties , vol. 1, p. 622.
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to oblige Holland to make war.’ 1 The stubborn Dutch, however, were
understandably suspicious of Belgian aspirations in regard not only to
freer navigation of the Scheldt but even to the territories of Limburg and
Dutch Flanders — the Council of Four had turned down a Belgian scheme
for acquiring such slices of Holland and compensating her with German
territory in Prussian Gelderland or East Friesland. A comprehensive re-
vision of the settlement of 1839 was also stultified, partly owing to British
refusal to guarantee Belgium unless she resumed her profitless neutrality.
As to the east, the Allied powers, hastily demobilised, were left with
barely strength enough to evict from the new Baltic states of Latvia and
Lithuania the ruthless German freebooters under General von der Goltz
who, even after the peace treaty was signed, aimed at clamping down a
teutonic domination there and so resuming the German drive to the east.
The Supreme Council at Paris doubted its power to coerce, if necessary,
even Hungary or Bulgaria. Balfour opined on 26 July 1919 that ‘the
Powers, which, eight months ago, were the conquerors of the world,
could not, at the present moment, impose their will on an army of
120,000 men’. 2 Of the European conquerors Britain was bent upon
reducing her continental commitments, France was wearied and Italy was
embittered by her treatment at the peace conference.
If Italy’s allies were unenthusiastic about her military performance in the
war, Italy understandably resented the way in which they had concluded
the Sykes-Picot Agreement behind her back, and was further put out
when at the peacemaking she found herself less popular with them than
her Adriatic rival, Yugoslavia, largely comprising Croats and Slovenes
from the Austro-Hungarian empire, her main enemy. But Italy alienated
her friends by her ‘blinkered greed’ (Lloyd George) in pressing not only
her extensive claims under the secret Treaty of London but also her
vociferous demand for Fiume, which that treaty had assigned to Croatia.
The question of Fiume was accorded a symbolic significance beyond its
intrinsic importance both by Italy, whose poet D’Annunzio seized it in a
filibustering raid on 12 September 1919, and on the other side by Wilson,
who, in refusing to concede it to Italy, matched Sonnino in stubbornness
and had provoked the Italian delegation to temporary withdrawal from
the conference by issuing an unseemly manifesto on 23 April 1919. Lloyd
George warned Wilson of ‘ a growing feeling that Europe was being bullied
by the United States ’. 3 After much commotion the question was eventually
left for direct settlement between Italy and Jugoslavia and dragged on
until 1924 when most of Fiume was secured by Italy, who had earlier
acquired Zara and Lagosta while renouncing her wider claims to Dalmatia
1 Lieut.-Colonel Twiss at a meeting of great powers on the commission, 22 August 1919;
Woodward and Butler, Documents on British Foreign Policy, First Series, vol. v, pp. iii-iv
and 277-8.
2 Ibid. First Series, vol. I, p. 207.
* Meeting of Council of Four, 3 May 1919: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. v, p. 430.
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under the Treaty of London. This Italian concentration on the Adriatic
diminished her activity, if not in appetite, in other regions such as Africa
where her interest in the direction of Abyssinia was indicated by her claim
to British and French Somaliland and to the French holdings in the
Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway. This claim being resisted, Italy in May
1919 offered to swap it for a mandate over the former German colony
of Togoland on the other side of Africa. This also was unpalatable to
Britain and France, who divided Togoland and the Cameroons between
them, eventually under mandates. Italy had to be content, or discontent,
with Jubaland in East Africa, ceded by Britain in 1924, and minor con-
cessions from France on the Libyan border.
The Italian Prime Minister wrote to the British on 25 May 1919:
I cannot look forward without grave apprehensions to the future of continental
Europe; the German longing for revenge must be considered in conjunction with
the Russian position. We can thus see even now that the settlement to be arrived
at will lack the assent of more than half the population of the European continent.
If we detach from the block on which the new European system will have to rely
for support forty million Italians, and force them into the ranks of the malcontents,
do you think that the new order will rest on a firm basis ? 1
The might of Russia had for the present fallen away to the east and now
that of America was to be withdrawn in the west so that, despite the resi-
dual League of Nations, European policies throughout the 1920s tended,
with exceptions, to be cast upon a reduced scale. Wilson, back in America,
suffered a paralytic stroke at the end of September 1919 and lingered on
a broken man. Events swiftly suggested his partisan error in provoking
the Republican party in the congressional elections of 191 8 and in rejecting
advice to include one of its leading members in the American Commission
to Negotiate Peace. Strong opposition to the Treaty of Versailles had
developed among those to whom a policy of splendid isolation seemed as
desirable for America in the twentieth century as it had for Britain in the
nineteenth. On 19 March 1920 the treaty finally failed to secure the ratifica-
tion by the Senate required by the constitution. Such was the repudiation
of the policy of the President who had assured his staff during their voyage
to the peace conference that ‘ the men whom we were about to deal with
did not represent their own people’. 2 America, having constrained the
European allies to make peace upon the basis of an American programme,
now left them to it.
Along with this repudiation went the American treaty of military
guarantee to France which in turn, under the terms of agreement, released
Britain from her undertaking. Thus did France find herself deprived of
one of the main guarantees of security accorded her in return for renuncia-
tion of her demands in the Rhineland. No promising Anglo-French attempt
1 Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, vol. n p. 883.
2 Bowman Memorandum of 10 December 1918: C. Seymour, op. cit. vol. iv, p. 291.
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to remedy this situation was made until the end of 1921 and even then
negotiations flagged and eventually petered out, England having tried
among other things to link them with lesser questions and France con-
tending that the original guarantee of 1919 was humiliating to her
because unilateral, and inadequate since it did not cover German ‘ indirect
aggression’ in eastern Europe. As the French Ambassador said in Decem-
ber 1921 to Lord Curzon, the touchy successor to the urbane Balfour: ‘It
would not cover us against a Polish Sadowa, which for Germany would be
the best preparation for a new Sedan. u If Poland was ‘ the linch-pin of the
Treaty of Versailles ’ (Churchill), yet Balfour had earlier prophesied that,
were she reconstituted, ‘ France would be at the mercy of Germany in the
next war, for this reason, that Russia could not come to her aid without
violating the neutrality of Poland’. 2 That, however, still rested with the
future, as did the implications of Curzon’s refusal now to pledge immediate
British military aid to France if Germany should violate the demilitarised
zone of the Rhineland. He admitted that the eastern frontier of France
was ‘in a sense the outer frontier of Great Britain herself’, but refused to
go beyond or undertake commitments in eastern Europe. France, deprived
of her former Russian alliance, was left to seek such security as she could
find in her traditional alternative, alliance with Poland (1921), and in
association with the Little Entente, formed against Hungary in 1920-1 by
Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia. Italy’s rivalry with France
in central Europe and the Balkans was indicated by her tendency to sup-
port Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania against these powers. This rivalry
was significantly reduced in scale from the pre-war antagonism between
Austria-Hungary and Russia, but was also the forerunner of a graver
division. Already in August 1922, two months before Mussolini in-
augurated the fascist era in Italy, an Austrian statesman had put it to
Lord D’Abemon, British Ambassador in Berlin, that ‘the real fact was
that two incompatible alliances were fighting for the mastery in Central
Europe: A North and South Alliance between Germany, Austria, and
Italy. An East and West Alliance between France, Czecho-Slovakia, and
Poland.’ 3
Britain viewed this French activity with a coolness verging on disfavour
and there was ill-judged talk of a French domination of Europe: in fact
the power of France was fragile. This was early suggested in the Middle
East, where the positions were rather reversed, Britain being the principal
exponent of a forward policy. Britain at the peace conference, secure in her
1 Documents retatifs aux negociations concernant les garanties de securite contre une
agression de I’Allemagne, 10 Janvier 1919-7 decembre 1923, French Yellow Book of 1924,
p. 92.
* Balfour in a conversation between Colonel House, Lloyd George, Balfour and Sir Edward
Grey, ^February 1916: Louis L. Gerson, Woodrow Wilsonand the Rebirth of Poland, 1914-
1920 (New Haven, 1953), pp. 27-8.
3 Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace (London, 1929-30), vol. 11, p. 101.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
basic gains and dominant in Persia, indulged in two somewhat gratuitous
and emotional policies, both calculated to antagonise Muslim populations.
The first was a modem edition of ancient Greek colonisation upon the
Ionian shores : a Greek expedition to Smyrna, largely Hellenic in popula-
tion, was promoted in May 1919 by Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemen-
ceau in accord with Venizelos, the persuasive Greek premier; this was
during Italian absence owing to Wilson’s manifesto of 23 April, and in
order to forestall a repetition at Smyrna of independent Italian landings
at other points in the zone allotted her by the secret Agreement of Saint-
Jean-de-Maurienne. This agreement of 1917 was a corollary, in respect of
Italy’s rights, to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but its validity was held by
her allies to have lapsed owing to the defection of Russia. An unlikely
project for affording Italy compensation in the Caucasus was turned down
by the government of the shrewd Nitti, who had succeeded Orlando in
June 1919.
The second British policy was the constitution in biblical Palestine of a
Jewish national home, after centuries of Jewish dispersion, in accordance
with the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. Britain’s attempt in
Palestine to reconcile her obligations to the Arabs and to the Jews is a
long, sad and separate story. A related problem, too, was how to reconcile
her obligations to the Arabs under the Hussein-McMahon correspondence
of 1915-16 (see ch. x) with those to the French under the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, which was difficult since they were, in spirit at least, in-
consistent. The French authorities wrongly suspected that their position
in Syria was being disloyally undermined by the British, who in fact urged
their Arab adherent, the Emir Feisal, to come to terms with them. In
March 1920, however, Feisal defiantly assumed the title of King of Syria
and Palestine and was expelled after France had, despite fierce Arab
opposition, been designated as the mandatory for Syria at the allied Con-
ference of San Remo on 25 April 1920. Then also British interests in
Palestine and Mesopotamia emerged as mandates and an Anglo-French
oil agreement was concluded, to be subsequently modified, however, in
favour of the United States, which stood out for a share of the economic
spoils of the Turkish Empire, with which they had not been at war, by
pressing the principle of the Open Door stipulated for mandatory regimes.
Such was the delicate adjustment in the Near East of national ambitions
with the new international idealism.
The renunciation by Turkey of her Arab territories and of her suzerainty
over Egypt and Cyprus was notable as being among the lasting provisions
of the impermanent Treaty of Sevres whereby the Allies made peace
with Turkey on 10 August 1920. The details of this treaty, which left
the Turks in Constantinople and the Greeks in Smyrna, both contrary to
Curzon’s judgement, and of the accompanying agreement allocating French
and Italian spheres of influence in Turkey, are perhaps of greater interest
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in relation to the Eastern Question of the nineteenth century than to the
peace settlement of the twentieth. For the treaty, delayed while the Allies
waited upon the improbable event of America’s deciding to assume a
mandate for Constantinople or Armenia, remained unratified and stulti-
fied by the nationalist uprising which had meantime gathered momentum
under Mustafa Kemal, largely impelled by the Greek occupation of
Smyrna. This occupation was generally recognised at the time but never
by its philhellenic champion, Lloyd George, to be a lamentable blunder.
The ascendant Kemal set up a nationalist government in Angora (Ankara)
over against that of the moribund sultanate in Constantinople, and by the
Franklin-Bouillon Agreement of October 1921 France concluded with
the nationalists a new and separate peace agreement apart from Great
Britain. France failed to comprehend, and therefore mistrusted, British
motives in maintaining what Curzon himself called ‘the precarious and
as I think worthless alliance of the Greeks’. 1 France and Italy now
favoured the Turkish nationalists who finally routed the Greeks and
entered Smyrna early in September 1922. This victory in turn menaced
the small Allied forces still stationed upon the Asiatic shores of the Straits,
a region where France and Italy habitually suspected British designs.
They both withdrew their contingents from Chanak on 2 1 September 1 922,
leaving the British to make a stand alone. This they did with such fortunate
effect that Mustafa Kemal agreed to a conference at Mudanya on 3 October
1922, the prelude to peace negotiations at Lausanne (see below, p. 291).
Lloyd George’s eastern policy brought disaster to his favourite Greeks
and an end to his own government on 19 October 1922. Curzon, however,
remained as Foreign Secretary in the Conservative government of Bonar
Law and, despite French intrigue, retrieved Britain’s position by a per-
sonal triumph at the Lausanne Conference. As regards the two main
British interests, satisfactory solutions were reached over the Straits and,
eventually, Mosul. Thus by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923
Britain after all came off at least as well in the Turkish settlement as did
France or Italy.
The series of Anglo-French squabbles in those post-war years seemed
almost to justify Paul Cambon when he wrote at the close of his twenty-
years’ embassy for France in London: ‘I do not believe in the possibility
of a rupture but everywhere, on every point, there is disagreement and the
misfortune is that neither in Paris nor in London are they intelligent
enough to reduce the disagreements to the essential points and disregard
the trifles. It is easier to settle the big questions than the baubles. But men
like Curzon or Leygues only care about the baubles.’ 2 Certainly per-
sonalities played a part as always. The French came to distrust Lloyd
1 Letter to Austen Chamberlain, 27 September 1922: The Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life
of Lord Curzon (London, 1928), vol. in, p. 305.
2 Letter to his son, 14 October 1920: Paul Cambon, Correspondance 1870-1924 (Paris,
1940 f.), vol. m, p. 386.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
George as being too pro-German and pro-Russian, and the British were
alienated by the ungenerous legalism of Poincare, French Prime Minister
from January 1922 till June 1924. But these rubs were indications of a
deeper psychological divergence which made the really big question, the
treatment of Germany, not at all easy to solve. Briefly, Briand, Prime
Minister between Leygues and Poincare, spoke for war-scarred France
in declaring (21 November 1921) that she could not disarm physically
till Germany disarmed morally; whereas British statesmen sought a more
cordial security through German goodwill by favouring her rehabilitation.
They were impelled by motives psychological, the British being poor haters,
political, being afraid of Communist Russia, and economic, seeking to
stimulate that world trade which was Britain’s mainstay. Time alone
could, and did, demonstrate which thesis was the more nearly correct.
This divergence was thrown into relief by episodes in the execution of
the peace treaty, as in Upper Silesia, and especially by the negotiations
concerning reparation at the series of Allied conferences which distin-
guished the period 1920-2. Germany did not help Britain to help her.
Her representatives created a bad impression upon their first appearance
at the Conference of Spa in July 1920 with inadequate proposals regarding
reparation backed by a most offensive speech by Stinnes, the German
coal magnate; and again on 1 March 1921 at the London Conference they
proposed ‘indefensible’ terms (D’Abemon), rejected the demands of the
incensed Allies, and consequently provoked an extension of the Allied
occupation to Dusseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhrort on 8 March, a sanction
of marginal legality under the treaty. On 27 April 1921 the Reparation
Commission announced its decision fixing Germany’s total liability for
reparation at the severe figure of £6,600 million. Also it found that, as
regards the initial £1,000 million (20,000 million gold marks) which Ger-
many was bound to pay by 1 May 1921, she was in default by at least
12,000 million marks. On 5 May the Allied governments communicated
to Germany a ‘schedule of payments’ prescribing methods for discharging
her obligations which in practice mitigated them, but included a demand
for the payment of £50 million (one milliard marks) by the end of the
month; a covering ultimatum stated that, if a satisfactory reply were not
made within six days, the Allies would on 12 May occupy the Ruhr. After
a governmental crisis in Germany, Wirth’s administration accepted the
Allied terms on 1 1 May, and had by August paid the first milliard marks,
Germany’s first cash payment. In these critical events Allied unity had
been maintained, but so precariously as to promise ill for further strains
ahead.
It was increasingly borne in upon Allied statesmen that the question of
German reparation was closely related to that of Allied debts. They had
been sharply warned off this delicate ground by the American Treasury in
March 1919, but that July House wrote to Wilson in a prescient letter on
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Anglo-American relations : ‘ Do you not think also that our people should
be warned not to expect complete payment of loans to the Entente?
Should they not be asked to consider a large share of these loans as a
part of our necessary war expenditures, and should not an adjustment be
suggested by us and not by our debtors?’ 1 Wilson did not think so. Nor
did Congress, which in February 1922 appointed a World War Foreign
Debt Commission to collect the Allied debts by 1947 and impose a rate
of interest not less than 4 per cent. Here the case of Britain was a special
one, as being both debtor and creditor. For after America had entered
the war she took over the traditional British position as banker of the
alliance and Britain acted as broker for her European allies, contracting
heavy debts in the United States, largely on their behalf. The Balfour Note
of 1 August 1922 to the Allied powers reminded them that, exclusive of
interest, they together owed Great Britain about £1,300 million, in addition
to the £650 million due to her from Russia and £1,450 million as German
reparation; for her part Great Britain owed £850 million to the United
States. The note explained that American insistence upon payment com-
pelled Britain to abandon her previous policy of refraining from asking for
any Allied payments to her; the British government would nevertheless still
prefer to remit all Allied war debts due to it, and the British share of
reparation, as part of an all-round cancellation of war-indebtedness in ‘ one
great transaction’. This statesmanlike proposal got a bad reception. The
linking of war debts with reparations was opposed, for different reasons,
both by the French and by the Americans, whose materialistic mood was
reflected in President Coolidge’s remark, ‘They hired the money, didn’t
they?’ The British government accordingly sent Stanley Baldwin and
Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, to Washington,
where the American negotiators imposed such stringent terms that the
British premier, Bonar Law, nearly resigned rather than accept them.
Overborne, however, by considerations of party loyalty, he acquiesced.
The British funded debt was fixed at 4,600 million dollars repayable over
sixty-two years and subject to an average rate of 3y per cent interest.
France had been a main beneficiary from the American loans which
Britain was required to repay but Poincare resented her trying to pass on
the pinch. It added to the resentment which France already felt at being
denied any priority of reparation for her devastated regions: their re-
construction, plus war pensions, was costing the French government half
of its total yearly expenditure. In this heavy situation Poincare was
determined to secure ‘ productive pledges ’ from Germany, where inflation
was mounting during 1922 and the government applying for, and partially
obtaining, a moratorium on reparations. Productive guarantees chiefly
meant for Poincare the long-contemplated occupation of the Ruhr. At
the end of December 1922 the Reparation Commission, by a vote of the
1 The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. xi, p. 623.
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French, Italian and Belgian representatives against the vigorous protest
of the British, Sir John Bradbury, declared Germany in default on an
insignificant delivery of timber, and on 9 January 1923, under the same
conditions, declared a default in coal deliveries. Two days later French
and Belgian forces marched into the Ruhr.
Bradbury had in the preceding August, as D’ Abernon noted, gone ‘ out
of his way to tell the Germans that, in the event of France taking isolated
action, England would not interfere, but would adopt an attitude of “ surly
neutrality”. The phrase has stuck in the German mind.’ 1 It was a forecast
as accurate as it was impolitic. With no united front against them, the
German government ordered passive resistance in the Ruhr. This measure
created dislocation and severely hampered the French in their attempt to
draw economic benefit from an occupation which they compromised politi-
cally by fostering the separatist movement, by then weak, in the Rhineland,
and by imprisoning local industrialists, who preferred inflation to pro-
viding reparation. The French, however, reckoned that they extracted over
1,300 million francs from Germany that year while the German govern-
ment’s recklessly defiant subsidising of idle hands in the Ruhr sent inflation
rocketing, with values gone crazy with noughts— 4,200,000,000,000 marks
to the dollar at the peak in November 1923. This, more than 1918, was
the true social revolution in Germany. But events were already on the
turn. That November also witnessed the failure in Munich of Hitler’s
national-socialist coup, the climax of a year of extremist disturbance in
Germany. Already on 27 September the ruinous policy of passive resistance
had been abandoned by the new German government under Stresemann,
formerly an intense nationalist, now a secret romantic with an unusual
sense of practical moderation. By the end of November the Schacht-
Luther financial reforms had already begun a feat of rapid recovery almost
as remarkable as the inflation itself, and on 30 November the French
government agreed to participate in an expert enquiry, favoured by the
other Allied governments and by the United States, into the central ques-
tion of Germany’s capacity to pay reparation.
The enquiry was presided over by the American General Dawes and
on 9 April 1924 it presented its report, known as the Dawes Plan. French
delay in evacuating the Ruhr levered Germany into accepting the plan,
and its adoption by France was facilitated by Herriot’s succeeding
Poincare on 1 June. The resultant agreement between Germany and the
Allies was signed in London on 16 August. The Dawes Plan was based
upon the interrelated prerequisites of a balanced budget and a stabilised
currency in Germany, the bank of issue being free from governmental
control but subjected to supervision to protect foreign interests. The sys-
tem of supervision was agreeable to France, less so the accompanying
demotion of the Reparation Commission. By a similar adjustment, while
1 Lord D’ Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 11, p. 91.
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the theoretical total of reparation due remained unaltered, Germany was
in practice to pay on a much more moderate scale rising in five years from
£50 million to the standard rate of £125 million, with special provision
for the transfers to be operated by the recipients as a safeguard against a
collapse of the exchange. In order to tide Germany over, a foreign loan
of 800 million gold marks was raised, mostly in America. Foreign, especi-
ally American, capital was pumped into Germany, so that during the
period 1924-8 she achieved an insecure prosperity and punctually dis-
charged her obligations under the Dawes Plan. This seemingly satisfactory
solution thus represented a financial roundabout whereby America lent to
Germany who paid reparation to the European Allies who repaid debts
to America. Such was the tangled legacy of war in which the nations had
got caught up.
The Dawes Plan, however, marked the end of the worst of the post-war
hangover. In 1925 European primary production first surpassed the level
of 1913. Politically, the prospect of overcoming the frustration of Anglo-
French friction was improved in October 1924 when the francophil Austen
Chamberlain became British Foreign Secretary in Baldwin’s new Conserva-
tive government. That government rejected, indeed, the diffuse idealism
of the Geneva Protocol which its Labour predecessor had helped to
elaborate (cf. ch. ix), but there was a swift demonstration of the beneficial
effects of Anglo-French collaboration, in the interests of which Chamber-
lain revived the idea of a defensive alliance. Stresemann, who directed
Germany’s foreign policy from 1923 to 1929, perceived that ‘a security
agreement without Germany would have been a security agreement against
Germany’. 1 On 9 February 1925 the German government presented to the
French government a memorandum suggesting a pact for a considerable
period between the powers interested in the Rhine, especially England,
France, Italy and Germany, whereby they would undertake not to make
war upon one another. This was a revised revival of an abortive proposal
made by the German Chancellor Cuno in December 1922, and it was now
blended with that of an Anglo-French alliance to constitute the Locarno
Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, concluded together with pendant arrange-
ments on 16 October 1925. By this treaty Britain, France, Italy, Germany
and Belgium severally and collectively guaranteed the western frontier
of Germany and the provisions of Versailles concerning the demilitarised
zone. This agreement morally strengthened the peace settlement of 1919,
since Germany now freely underwrote its attribution of Alsace-Lorraine,
Eupen-Malmedy and the disarmed Rhineland, but materially weakened
it since, in accordance with Stresemann’s design, it circumscribed its
military enforcement. But then for the British government, at least, mili-
tary underpinning of its liabilities under the Pact of Locarno was scarcely
1 Note by Stresemann, 1 July 1925 : Eric Sutton, Gustav Stresemann, his Diaries, Letters,
and Papers (London, 1935-40), vol. 11, p. 98.
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a very active concern at a time when the Prime Minister, Baldwin, was
emphasising that ‘any new obligation undertaken by His Majesty’s
Government must be pacific’. 1 Western Europe emerged for a space
into ‘the pale sunlight of Locarno’ (Churchill).
The Pact of Locarno was to enter into force when Germany entered the
League of Nations, which she did on io September 1926. A week later
Stresemann and Briand lunched privately at a little hostelry with first-rate
cooking at Thoiry near Geneva, and there waxed expansive over Strese-
mann’s favourite theme of Franco-German economic collaboration, even,
according to him, projecting it into Russia. In the west at the end of that
month Germany, France, Belgium and Luxemburg formed an International
Steel Cartel, a seminal initiative in the European economics of partnership
from which Great Britain notably held aloof. At Thoiry Stresemann had
further probed towards fresh relaxations of the Treaty of Versailles in
return for German bolstering of the French economy. This did not com-
mend itself, though, either to Schacht, the power of the Reichsbank, or to
American interests.
American initiative, however, encouraged Briand towards a notable
achievement in another direction. In 1927 he communicated to Kellogg,
the American Secretary of State, a draft treaty for the renunciation of war
between their two countries. After waiting six months to reply, Kellogg
suggested in December that the proposed treaty be made multilateral.
The outcome was the Pact of Paris or Kellogg Pact of 27 August 1928,
whereby fifteen powers renounced war as an instrument of national policy,
subject to some limited reservations. Great Britain for instance entering
one concerning ‘certain regions’ in which she was vitally interested —
a pointer towards the Suez Canal. By 1933 sixty-five nations had sub-
scribed to this well-intentioned if somewhat indefinite undertaking.
These events illustrated the anxious preoccupation of the powers with
regard to security in the aftermath of the war to end war. At the centre
of the problem of security lay that of disarmament. Reparation and
disarmament were the two main long-term obligations of Germany under
the Treaty of Versailles, and the supervision of their fulfilment, respec-
tively through the Reparation Commission and the Control Commissions
working under the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris, was in the fore-
front of the policy of the Allies. In disarming Germany they had to
reckon above all with General von Seeckt, a brilliant Prussian staff-officer,
cultivated and withdrawn. Chief of the German army directorate ( Chef der
Heeresleitung ) since the second quarter of 1920, Seeckt had begun by in-
structing commanders to cease measures for reducing the German army
to the stipulated strength of 100,000 men since the German government
were opposed to it. Seeckt, however, failed to induce the Allies at the
Conference of Spa to permit double that number and eventually the
1 Speech by Baldwin at Brighton, 8 October 1925: The Times, 9 October 1925.
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reduction was effected, at least on paper. For Seeckt emulated Scham-
horst’s subterfuge after Jena when he had secretly reconstituted the
Prussian army in defiance of Napoleonic disarmament. Volunteers were
rapidly passed through the army despite the limitation of enlistments to
regulars for a twelve-year period under article 174. The recruitment of the
so-called Black Reichswehr embraced the development of paramilitary
organisations such as the Einwohnerwehr and Arbeitskommandos in
violation of article 177 of the treaty. This was matched by illegal militarisa-
tion of the police, who were, indeed, liable to be especially important for
maintaining internal order if military disarmament had been scrupulously
observed, rather than evaded. Any loophole in the treaty was in fact in-
geniously exploited : for instance, while it limited the number of officers to
4,000, it omitted to do likewise for non-commissioned officers, who were
accordingly increased out of all proportion to the needs of a small army in
accordance with Seeckt’s aim of building up a military elite ( Fiihrerheer ).
Similarly, at the top, the general staff, prohibited by article 160, was
maintained under a rich variety of subterfuges and engaged in equally
forbidden activities such as plans for general mobilisation (violation of
article 178) and for promoting military aviation, prohibited by article 198.
Stocks of arms due for surrender were often hidden and the tasks of the
Allied control commissions deliberately rendered difficult and unpleasant.
Graver still, the German army was trained in the use of forbidden weapons
such as armoured cars and tanks, Seeckt being a far-sighted exponent of
mobile warfare. Nor were manoeuvres with dummy guns and cardboard
tanks a smiling matter when directed by the author of the grim definition:
‘Warlike is meant not in the sense of the imitation of war, but in that of
a preparation for a war.’ 1
By all-round evasion and violation of the treaty Seeckt created not a
small army but a great army in miniature, its danger lying in its poten-
tialities. Here considerations both psychological and economic entered
in. Seeckt was determined to combat ‘moral disarmament’, of which,
already in March 1922, D’Abemon, a good friend of Germany, wrote in
Berlin: ‘I not only doubt the existence of this at the present moment,
but its bare possibility at any date. No one that I have met here would
think a successful war morally reprehensible.’ 2 On the economic side
Seeckt perceived that what mattered was less the accumulation of obso-
lescent armaments than the co-ordination of manufacturing potential
for military requirements. Here he secured the backing of Chancellor
Wirth, who secretly subsidised the Krupp armament enterprise. That
formidable concern concluded a formal agreement on 25 January 1922
with the German ministry of defence ‘jointly to circumvent ... the
1 General von Seeckt. Cited, General Friedrich von Rabenau, Seeckt: aus seinem Leben
1918-1936 (Leipzig, 1940), p. 503.
2 Lord D’Abemon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 1, p. 279.
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provisions of the Treaty of Versailles ’.* This activity was extended abroad,
beyond allied reach. By 1925 Krupp held a controlling interest in the
Bofors arms-works in Sweden, and was projecting the latest thing in
heavy guns and tanks. German submarines were secretly built and crews
trained in Holland, Spain and Finland. Even before the Russo-German
Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 there were afoot clandestine arrangements fore-
shadowing the development in the Soviet Union of German artillery, tanks
at Kazan, poison gas at Saratov, and at Lipetsk airbase fighters and dive-
bombers. Training extended to staff-courses with Soviet officers. Even
during the inflation of 1923 Wirth’s successor, Cuno, had tentatively
agreed on 1 1 July to finance German military collaboration with Russia
to the tune of sixty million gold marks in the following year. Seeckt for his
part considered that resurgent Germany should especially work with
Russia, to destroy Poland. So had Wirth. He told Brockdorff-Rantzau,
setting out after Rapallo as German Ambassador to Moscow: ‘Poland
must be disposed of. My policy is set towards this goal . . . It is . . . with my
agreement that many things, too, have happened relative to the eastern
frontier which are known only to a few besides myself. On this point I am
in complete agreement with the military, especially with General von
Seeckt.’ 2
In these views Seeckt, probably the most considerable soldier of the
1920s, was not, however, at one with their most eminent statesman, Strese-
mann, whose name stamped the pacific period of fulfilment and Locarno.
Yet the divergence was rather less than might appear. Stresemann was
largely aware of Seeckt’s illicit rearmament, notably in Russia, and lied to
D’Abernon in order to shield it. Pacific Stresemann was, though, in that
in the time of German weakness he aimed at achieving his policy without
war; but it was deep policy, deep and wide. It embraced ‘the protection
of Germans abroad, those 10 to 12 millions of our kindred who now live
under a foreign yoke in foreign lands’. 3 In this connection Stresemann
held as regards the South Tyrol, for instance, that ‘the German qualities
of Walther von der Vogel weide bear witness that Bozen (Bolzano) is
within the German cultural community ’. 4 Stresemann aimed at regaining
Eupen from Belgium, and for him ‘ the recovery of the German colonies
is an object, and a very present object, of German policy’. 6 For him too,
moreover, a principal objective was ‘the readjustment of our eastern
1 Cited, Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945 (Oxford, 1955),
p. 406.
a Cited, Herbert Helbig, ‘Die Moskauer Mission des Grafen Brockdorff-Rantzau’, in
Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte (ed. H. Jablonowski and W. Philipp; Berlin,
1954 f ). vol. n, p. 306.
3 Letter from Stresemann to the former German Crown Prince, 7 September 1925:
Sutton, Gustav Stresemann , his Diaries, Letters, and Papers, vol. u, p. 503.
1 Speech in the Reichstag, 9 February 1926: ibid. vol. n, p. 454.
6 Speech of 29 August 1925: ibid. vol. 11, p. 314.
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frontiers; the recovery of Danzig, the Polish corridor, and a correction
of the frontier in Upper Silesia’. 1 It was in Streseman n ’s time and in
accordance with instructions that Brockdorff-Rantzau on 20 December
1924 put it to Chicherin, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, that the
‘solution of the Polish question, for Germany as well as for Russia, lay in
the pushing back of Poland to her ethnographic frontiers’, 2 as defined by
her enemies.
In negotiating the pact of Locarno Stresemann was able to exploit
Britain’s standing refusal to underwrite French commitments in eastern
Europe ; he resisted all French attempts to secure in favour of her allies
there a German undertaking ‘ to abstain from any attack. This obligation
we undertook in the West, but we refused it in the East. Membership of
the League does not exclude the possibility of war.’ 3 D’Abernon’s earlier
suggestion to Stresemann of a ‘reciprocal iron curtain’ 4 between Germany
and France in the Rhineland began to assume an ominous significance,
and Stresemann saw ‘ in Locarno the preservation of the Rhineland, and
the possibility of the recovery of German territory in the East’. 6 The
settlement, as so often in German foreign policy, wore a two-faced aspect,
fair to west, grim to east. There France’s weakened position despite signi-
ficant new treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia was emphasised not
only by Stresemann’s gibes at those two countries but also by the further
Russo-German treaty of friendship signed at Berlin on 24 April 1926.
It was in pursuance of this ‘fierce friendship’ (Lloyd George) that Strese-
mann at Locarno had secured a critical weakening for Germany of
article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Stresemann, who exploited diplomatically the nationalist opposition
against him in the German parliament, crowned his success against France
at Locarno by presenting it as a concession to the Allies in return for
which they adopted favourable ‘reactions’ towards Germany, notably by
evacuating the Cologne zone by 31 January 1926. This first instalment of
the evacuation of the Rhineland had been refused by the Allies the year
before owing to ‘ the numerous defaults of the German government ’ 6 as
regards disarmament. Here the Allied Military Control Commission was
unable to pronounce itself fully satisfied even by 31 January 1927, when
it was obligingly withdrawn. It declared in its final report a month later:
The Commission was confronted, in the German government, by a knowing and
diligent adversary in regard to whom the Commission by itself possessed no means
1 Letter to the former Crown Prince: ibid. vol. n, p. 503.
* Cited, Kurt Rosenbaum, Community of Fate (Syracuse, N.Y., 1965), p. 124.
3 Speech of 14 December 1925: Sutton, Gustav Stresemann, his Diaries, Letters, and
Papers, vol. n, p. 217.
4 Lord D’Abemon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. in, p. 101.
5 Letter to Dr von Keudell, 27 November 1925: Sutton, Gustav Stresemann, his
Diaries , Letters, and Papers, vol. 11, pp. 231-2.
6 Note presented to the German Government by the British, French, Italian, Japanese and
Belgian Ambassadors at Berlin, 4 June 192s, Cmd. 2429, 1925, p. 3.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
of constraint. . .The very history of the [military] control merges into that of the
incessant obstruction by Germany of the demands and decisions of the Commis-
sion . . . But the shadows of a picture are not enough to mask its colours, and it
should be acknowledged that the results attained are, such as they are, of capital
importance. . .In achieving them the Commission for its part has dug the founda-
tions of the building. . .which, since Locarno, is slowly beginning to rise from the
ground . 1
Such flowery apologetics suited official optimism. The weakness of
those foundations, though, had already been suggested in mid-January
1927 by the new British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Ronald Lindsay, who
expressed to Stresemann his ‘fears that there was still a strong spirit of
militarism and revenge in Germany’. 2 In 1928 the German Cabinet specifi-
cally endorsed illicit German rearmament. By the Hague Agreement of
August 1929, Stresemann’s last big achievement before his death that
October, the Allies undertook to complete the evacuation of the whole of
the Rhineland by 30 June 1930. This evacuation was related to the adop-
tion of the short-lived Young Plan whereby Germany’s obligations for
reparation were further reduced below those which she had assumed under
the Dawes Plan with an eye to promoting the French evacuation of the
Ruhr. Such was the outstanding success of Stresemann’s policy of ‘ driving
France back from trench to trench, as I once expressed it, since no general
attack is feasible’. 3
Germany pressed her ‘peace offensive’ (Stresemann) wherever she saw
an opening, as in the preamble to Part V of the Treaty of Versailles
wherein the disarmament of Germany was imposed ‘ in order to render
possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all
nations’. This, and a gloss upon it in the Allied reply of 16 June 1919 to
the Germans, did not lay a contractual obligation upon the Allies to dis-
arm, as German propaganda tried to make out, but they did constitute
a moral obligation. This moral obligation was cancelled by German
measures of rearmament in violation of the treaty. Though immediately
defensive, they cast an ominous shadow ahead at a time when the ten-year
rule in Whitehall exempted British service chiefs throughout the 1920s
from anticipating a major war within the following ten years. And in
general the victorious powers displayed a well-intentioned desire to work
towards general disarmament.
At first this desire was, however, mainly manifest in the field which least
affected Germany, the naval. The central issue here was Anglo-American
competition, for during the war the United States had been building their
navy up towards British strength and had, during the peace conference,
1 Commission Militaire Interaliee de Controle en Allemagne, Rapport Final, of 28 February
1927 (Paris, 1927), pp. 512-14.
2 Note by Stresemann, 15 January 1927: Sutton, Gustav Stresemann, his Diaries, Letters,
and Papers, vol. ill, p. 105.
2 Letter to Lieut.-General von Schoch, 27 July 1925: ibid. vol. n, p. 58.
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largely left unsatisfied British representations against continuing construc-
tion. American preoccupation here with Japan was evident at the Washing-
ton Conference of naval powers in 192 1-2 which achieved both a political
settlement in the Far East, where the Anglo-Japanese alliance was termi-
nated in deference to American and Dominion wishes (see ch. xn), and
an important agreement limiting naval armaments, signed on 6 February
1922. This pointed to the end of the naval supremacy of the Pax Britannica,
gracefully accepted by a poorer, less ardent Britain, imaginatively exploited
by the rival thrust of America. The agreement fixed a ratio in total tonnages
for American, British, Japanese, French and Italian capital ships, pre-
scribed a ten-year naval holiday in their construction, and limited their
size along with total tonnages for aircraft-carriers; but it failed to secure
any limitation by ratio for submarines, light cruisers and auxiliaries,
chiefly owing to French obstruction which further strained Anglo-French
relations. Anglo-American dissension, however, frustrated another attempt
to reach agreement with the Japanese in these last categories at a naval
conference in Geneva in the summer of 1927. A further naval conference
was opened in London in January 1930 and after intricate negotiation
produced on 22 April a three-power agreement between Great Britain, the
United States and Japan whereby Japan had the right to build up to
70 per cent of British or American total tonnage in cruisers, destroyers
and submarines, with parity at a low level in the latter. Franco-Italian
rivalry in the Mediterranean defeated all efforts to include those powers
in this agreement, and indicated the limitations to the considerable success
achieved in naval disarmament. Another indication was the contemporary
construction by Germany of the first ‘pocket battleship’, ingeniously
designed to conform to the letter of the io,ooo-ton limit imposed by the
peace treaty while defeating its object by its unorthodox and powerful
armament.
Military and aeronautical disarmament was more difficult to achieve
than naval, both intrinsically and in its special relation to the problem
of Germany. The protracted negotiations within the framework of the
League of Nations which began with the appointment of the preparatory
commission on disarmament in 1925 issued in a disarmament conference
which opened at Geneva on 2 February 1932 (see chs. ix and xxm). The
success of this conference was ominously prejudiced from the start by
Japanese aggression in Manchuria and in the end by the aggressive
ascendancy of National Socialism in Germany.
The strength of the Nazi party jumped up in the elections of September
1930 from 800,000 votes to 6 \ millions, to a peak of 13J millions in July
1932 (ch. xvi). Behind this phenomenon loomed the American slump on
Wall Street in October 1929, the month that Stresemann died, and the
ensuing economic blizzard which swept across Europe in renewed proof of
the dependence of the old world upon the riches of the new. Swept away
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was the Young Plan of the preceding summer. The withdrawal of American
credits revealed the insecurity of the German economy. The Austrian
finances, in which German banks were closely interested, were apt to be
delicate at the best of times, and in March 1931 the German government
of Bruning tried to combine a bolstering of both economies together
with a bold stroke of foreign policy by the surprise announcement of
agreement to establish an Austro-German customs union. The project
had to be dropped in the face of Anglo-French opposition. On 1 1 May 193 1
the largest Austrian bank, the Creditanstalt, failed and precipitated the
‘crisis within the crisis’. This spread across Germany to England, where
the Labour government fell and the pound was forced off the gold standard
on 21 September. Already in July the main European powers had, after
some haggling by France, who had built up much the largest gold reserve
after America, accepted President Hoover’s timely proposal for a one-year
moratorium on all payments of reparation and war-debts. In June 1932
a conference met at Lausanne to consider the situation upon the expiry
of the Hoover Moratorium. There von Papen’s ‘Cabinet of Barons’,
which had just succeeded that of Bruning, secured an important success
for Germany whereby reparation was at last abolished, subject to German
delivery of bonds to the amount of £150 million. A ‘gentlemen’s agree-
ment’ reached on 2 July by Germany’s creditors made ratification of this
settlement contingent upon a satisfactory settlement between them and
their creditors, namely, the United States. But America refused to cancel
or reduce Allied war-debts and squashed the expedient adopted by Britain
in 1933 of making token payments only. Thereafter the British government
joined the French and others in defaulting on its payments, refusing, in
effect, that the financial burden of the first world war should be inequitably
shifted from Germany, no longer paying reparation, to the European
Allies. And indeed even when Germany was paying reparation she had
paid in practice not from her own substance and sacrifice, but from her
loans and investments from abroad which amounted up to 1931 to some
35-8 milliard marks as against the total of 21 milliards which she had
paid to the Allies during the same period according to the books of the
Reparation Commission. Such was the sterile yield of a peace settlement
which, after first applying the sanction of military intervention to en-
forcing reparation rather than disarmament, had come to rely, in the
financial field even more than in others, upon the accommodating applica-
tion of stringent terms instead of the reverse.
In the face of the economic blizzard the European powers huddled away
from the expansive internationalism of the ’twenties, last manifest in
Briand’s plan for European union, into national economies behind tariff
barriers, especially after America introduced the very stiff Hawley-Smoot
tariff in 1929-30. This frustrated the conference which met at Geneva in
February 1930 to devise a tariff truce. The era of free trade was finishing;
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THE PEACE SETTLEMENT OF VERSAILLES
and, in totalitarian nations, the era of free thought. They were now joined
by Germany, who, in the time of economic stress, turned to a creed which
transcended economics, transformed politics and came to smash the
settlement of Versailles.
Thus was the peace settlement after the first world war largely under-
mined in three waves, successive but overlapping, political, economic and
psychological. Almost from the beginning it was compromised politically
not only by errors of judgement which the peacemakers made at times in
framing a very complex whole, but even more by the power-vacuum
left, to German advantage, by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and
Russian empires upon the one hand and by the falling away of the United
States upon the other: a void too great to fill by the hopeful innovation
of the League of Nations. This political insecurity was sharply accentuated
in the ’twenties by economic crises of quite unforeseen extent, first the
German inflation, the greatest in history, and then the world-wide slump.
These not only vitiated the whole structure of German reparation and
Allied war-debts but also demonstrated that, with the economic balance
now tilted towards America in what was possibly the greatest shift of
geopolitical stress since its discovery four centuries before, the victorious
powers had failed to achieve an economic ordering of international rela-
tions which would afford stability to liberal societies in the twentieth-
century phase of industrial capitalism. The ’thirties in turn demonstrated
that the maintenance of the peace settlement was gravely menaced by
unexpected phenomena not only economic but also psychological, ideo-
logical. The aftermath of the war to make the world safe for democracy
witnessed a retreat from its liberalism into Communism in Russia, into
Fascism in Italy and, most promptly disruptive, into National Socialism in
Germany. Wilson, who had sought to make the Treaty of Versailles the
palladium of international democracy, had intended that it should subject
the Germans to ‘a generation of thoughtfulness’. 1 But with many of them
their thoughts turned largely inwards, obscure and festering, less to repen-
tance than to revenge. And, whereas the Allied victors mainly came to
look to politicians of rather ordinary capacity, the German vanquished
found a leader of deep and evil inspiration. His mouthpiece proclaimed
in advance (April 1928):
We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves in the arsenal of democracy with
its own weapons. We are becoming deputies in order to paralyse the Weimar senti-
ment with its own assistance. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and
salaries for this purpose, that is its own affair. . .We come as enemies! As the wolf
bursts into the flock, so we come. 2
So they came. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany, of the Third German Empire.
1 Meeting of Council of Ten, 12 February 1919 : The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. hi,
p. 1002. 2 Dr Joseph Goebbels, Der Angriff (Munich, 1935), pp. 71-3.
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CHAPTER IX
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
T he Covenant of the League of Nations formed Part I of each of the
treaties of peace concluded after the first world war, and, when the
first of these, the Treaty of Versailles, entered into force on
io January 1920, the League began to exist. The incorporation of the
Covenant in the treaties was a point on which President Wilson had strongly
insisted at the peace conference; he looked to the League as a means
whereby injustices and imperfections in the treaties would at some future
time be corrected, and he probably foresaw that if the making of the
League were postponed until after the treaties came into force there would
almost certainly be no League at all. For the League this course had both
disadvantages and advantages. On the one hand it led to the League’s
sharing in the unpopularity which assailed the peace treaties, for it could
be represented by hostile or ignorant critics as merely an instrument which
the victors had devised in order to rivet on the vanquished the injustices
of the settlement. On the other hand the treaties had many provisions to
which effect could only be given by a continuing organisation such as the
League was intended to be, and by using the League for this purpose they
ensured that it would at once be called on to play a part in great affairs
and not be relegated to the obscurity to which, as Wilson had reason to
suspect, some of his colleagues would have liked to consign it.
The drafting committee at the peace conference worked on the basis of
a draft conflated by the British and United States legal advisers, Cecil
Hurst and David Hunter Miller, from suggestions prepared by Lord
Robert Cecil, General Smuts, a British Foreign Office committee under
Lord Phillimore, and Colonel House. French and Italian drafts were
hardly considered, and the finished Covenant thus reflected British and
United States rather than continental ideas. The League emerged from the
drafting committee possessed of no powers which could be described as
supra-national or even in a strict sense governmental, with little more
than the bare outlines of a constitution and free therefore to develop as
experience might direct. It was to be an association of sovereign states
pledged to co-operate with each other for specified purposes, and its
effectiveness depended on these pledges being honoured. The institutions
of the League were more in the nature of machinery designed to make it
as easy as possible for the members to agree and act together than organs
through which corporate action was to be taken, and ‘the League’ itself
was little more than a name serving to describe the members collectively.
It was clear too that the League would be an association more political
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than juridical in character, more in the tradition of the Concert of Europe,
which, as many of the founders of the League believed, had served Europe
well in the nineteenth century, than in that of the Hague Conferences, the
work of which had counted for practically nothing in the war just ended.
British opinion in particular hoped to find in the League an organisation
in which the great powers would meet regularly and whenever an emer-
gency made it desirable for them to confer, but in which the membership
and the functions would no longer be limited to Europe: they would be
served by a permanent secretariat, and they would accept some measure
of accountability to the rest of the world.
The original members of the League were the signatories of the treaties
of peace and a few other states invited in the treaties to accede to the
Covenant. There was to be an Assembly in which all the members were
represented, a Council, and a Secretariat headed by Sir Eric Drummond
(later Lord Perth) as first Secretary-General. Under the Hurst-Miller
draft the Council should have consisted of representatives of the great
powers only, but in deference to the strong opposition of the smaller
powers it was decided that while the great powers should be permanent
members the Assembly should elect four others from time to time, and
the number of these non-permanent members was progressively raised to
eleven. A few functions were specifically assigned respectively to the
Assembly or the Council, but the Covenant did not define their relations,
and either of them was authorised to deal with ‘any matter within the
sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world ’. 1 This
lack of differentiation was typical of the absence of rigidity in the Covenant
as a whole and it led to no inconvenient results. The Assembly, contrary
probably to the expectations of the founders, became the dominant organ,
partly because it was able to secure control of the budget; it provided
something wholly new in the intercourse of states and only possible in an
atmosphere of courtesy and restraint such as normally prevailed at Geneva,
a forum in which the smaller powers were free to criticise the great and
the great did not refuse to explain and justify their conduct before the
world. The Council, being a smaller body, meeting more frequently and
therefore better able to act promptly, came to serve as a sort of executive
committee of the Assembly, working out the details and supervising the
execution of policies which the Assembly had accepted in principle. In
conformity with the ordinary rule of international conferences the decisions
of either body had normally to be unanimous, but this rule was subject
to certain exceptions of which the most important were that matters of
procedure might be decided by a majority, and the vote of parties to a
dispute would not count against an otherwise unanimous Council or
1 League Covenant Articles hi and iv. Quotations from the Covenant are from the
version printed in F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (Oxford University
Press, 1952), vol. 1, ch. v.
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Assembly report on the dispute with recommendations for its settlement.
This rule of unanimity, however, had less influence on the practical work-
ing of the League than is sometimes supposed, because ‘action’ by the
League consisted not in the taking of decisions with binding effect upon
members, but rather in the formulation of recommendations and judge-
ments to which members by their signature of the Covenant had under-
taken to pay heed. The unanimity rule thus gave to a member not the
power to veto League action, but the means of ensuring that its own rights
and obligations should not be varied without its consent.
The Secretariat was the most original element in the constitution of the
League. The previous practice of international conferences had usually
been to rely for secretarial assistance on officials temporarily assigned to
the work by the participating states, and the disadvantages of this method
are obvious: it gave little chance for the development of a sense of cor-
porate responsibility, and it left no machinery in being to give effect to
the decisions of the conference. Sir Eric Drummond decided at the outset
that the Secretariat of the League should follow a different plan: it was
not to consist of national delegates, but of international servants whose
first loyalty should be to the League. That ideal could not always be
completely realised. It was not practicable, nor perhaps even desirable,
always to treat questions of nationality as irrelevant in such matters as the
recruitment of the members or the allocation of posts within the Secre-
tariat, and some governments, especially after the rise of totalitarianism,
sought to undermine the independence of the members by pressure which
it was virtually impossible to resist. None the less, it is for its success
rather than for its partial failure that this first experiment in the construc-
tion of a truly international civil service is chiefly remarkable.
The Council was directed by Article xrv of the Covenant to formulate
plans for the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice,
and one of its first acts was to set up a committee of jurists to advise it
on this matter. The committee prepared a draft which the Assembly
accepted as the basis of the statute of the court, and the court came into
existence in the latter part of 1921. Its jurisdiction comprised ‘all cases
which the parties refer to it and all matters specially provided for in
treaties and conventions in force’. Submission of disputes to the court
was therefore voluntary, but the statute contained a provision, the so-
called ‘ Optional Clause ’, by accepting which the members might, if they
chose, recognise the jurisdiction as compulsory in the classes of disputes
enumerated in the clause. As confidence in the court grew, after a few
years’ experience, this clause was widely accepted, though acceptances
were often accompanied by reservations which seriously reduced their
value. The court was in effect the judicial organ of the League and there
were constitutional links between them. The judges were elected by the
Assembly and the Council ; the expenses of the court were borne on the
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League budget; and besides its jurisdiction in contentious cases it was
empowered to give an advisory opinion on any dispute or question re-
ferred to it by the Assembly or the Council. These links, however, never
impaired the complete judicial independence of the court.
The prime purpose of the League was to achieve international peace
and security. The Covenant included a variety of ideas, not all of them
mutually consistent, by which this purpose was to be served. By Article x
the members undertook ‘to respect and preserve as against external
aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of
all Members of the League’. This seeming system of mutual guarantee
did not, however, bind any member to take any specific action in aid of
any other, for in case of aggression the Council was to ‘ advise upon the
means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled ’. The article remained in
fact little more than a pious statement of principle ; but it was unfortunately
regarded by President Wilson as the core of the Covenant and his refusal
to accept any compromise on it played a large part in the United States
Senate’s refusal to ratify the Treaty and the Covenant. There were, how-
ever, dangers in the article, clearly seen by Cecil, in that it might impose
a rigidity on the international system (which the French desired) that
would make it unable peacefully to cope with inevitable future pressures
for change. Cecil’s fears were in very limited degree met by the insertion
of Article xix by which the Assembly was empowered ‘ from time to time [to]
advise the reconsideration. . .of treaties which have become inapplicable
and the consideration of international conditions whose continuance
might endanger the peace of the world’. This article also remained largely a
dead letter, and it is certainly arguable that the inability of the members to
discover and operate effective procedures of peaceful change was a more
serious weakness of the League than their failure to adhere to their perhaps
inconsistent obligation to preserve each other’s territorial integrity.
The second idea for achieving peace found expression in Article xi.
‘Any war or threat of war ’ was declared to be ‘ a matter of concern to the
whole League’, and the League, acting as a commission of conciliation,
was to take ‘any action that may be deemed wise and effectual to safe-
guard the peace of nations’. Contrary to original expectations this article
proved to be the one under which most of the disputes that came before
the League were dealt with : its increased use reflected British views about
the way in which the League machinery might most wisely be employed.
Thirdly, the League was to exercise a quasi-arbitral function over
disputes, and in the last resort was to be an instrument for enforcing the
peace. By Articles xu-xvn, which set out these functions, the members
bound themselves to submit any ‘ dispute likely to lead to a rupture ’ to
one of three procedures: to settlement by the Permanent Court of Inter-
national Justice, to arbitration, or to enquiry by the Council ; and in no
case were they to resort to war until three months after the judicial
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decision, the arbitrators’ award, or the report of the Council as the case
might be, provided in the last case that the Council, apart from the dis-
puting parties, had been unanimous. If in disregard of any of these under-
takings a state should resort to war, the so-called sanctions were to become
applicable to it. All the other members were then to sever all trade and
financial relations with it, to prohibit all intercourse between its nationals
and their own, to prevent all intercourse between its nationals and those
of any other state whether a member of the League or not, and the
Council was to recommend what armed forces the members should
severally contribute to protect the covenants of the League. These pro-
visions reflected what was believed to be one of the lessons of the war,
namely, the overwhelming power of economic pressure, and therefore,
whilst the provisions for economic measures were detailed and peremp-
tory, those for military measures were left so obscure that it was never
certain whether or not they imposed any actual obligation on the members.
War was thus neither excluded nor made illegal. Members might resort
to war without breaking their obligations and so without exposing them-
selves to sanctions if the Council failed to reach unanimity in its report
on a dispute, or if it found that a dispute arose out of a matter solely
within the domestic jurisdiction of one of the parties (in which case it
might make no recommendations for a settlement), of if at the end of the
‘cooling-off’ period neither party accepted the decision of the Court or
the arbitrators or the report of the Council. In their caution the framers of
the Covenant were realistic, but the possibilities that a state might with
impunity resort to war came to be seen as ‘ gaps ’ in the Covenant. Much
effort in the ’twenties was devoted to efforts to close these ‘gaps’.
Before the League had even begun to exist it was dealt a grievous blow
by the refusal of the American Senate to consent to the ratification of the
peace treaties. The refusal meant much more than that the United States
would be absent from the counsels of the League, serious as that alone
would have been. It meant for League members, and for Britain and
France in particular, that the League in being would be a different League
from that which they had had in view when they accepted the Covenant.
When the Covenant was before the British parliament not a single member
expressed doubt as to the wisdom of accepting the sanctions provisions,
though evidently their burden would be heaviest for a naval power; but
these provisions took on a different aspect when it was seen not only that
the burden would not be shared with the United States, but that the situa-
tion might easily arise where Britain would have to choose between reneg-
ing on her obligation to impose sanctions on an aggressor and leading a
naval blockade and so denying that freedom of the seas which the United
States traditionally so vigorously asserted. For the Dominions also, but
particularly for Canada, the United States’ absence profoundly altered
the appearance of the enforcement provision of the Covenant. Primarily
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for this reason these provisions of the Covenant came under fire at the
first meeting of the Assembly in 1920, when the Canadian representative
proposed the elimination of Article x. The proposal was rejected, but it
was renewed in the two following years, and in 1923 it led to an interpreta-
tive resolution which declared that it was for each state to decide for itself
how far it was bound to employ its military forces in executing its obliga-
tions under the article. In 1921 the attack was extended to Article xvi and
certain ‘rules of guidance’ were adopted for its application which had the
effect of weakening its obligations. These amendments to the Covenant,
that sanctions should not be applied immediately and completely but
gradually and partially, and that all discussions on the subject should be
entrusted to the Council, never acquired legal force because France refused
to ratify them; but, on the only occasion when sanctions were applied in
I 935 » France was foremost in insisting that they should guide the League’s
action (see below, p. 259). All this was evidence of a trend of opinion
which had already come to regard the collective security provisions as a
dangerous experiment, and which, if it should prevail, would lead in-
exorably to a return to the pre-League system of every state relying for
its defence on its own armed forces. It was clear also that it endangered
a cause to which the League had already set its hand, that of the reduction
of national armaments ‘ to the lowest point consistent with national safety
and the enforcement by common action of international obligations’, for
the prospects of disarmament were inextricably bound up with those of
security (see ch. vm).
The Allies had justified the disarmament of Germany in the Treaty of
Versailles as being necessary to make possible a general reduction of
armaments, and the Covenant had expressly charged the Council to formu-
late plans for this purpose. It was therefore inevitable, though it may have
been unfortunate, that this problem should be among the first to be taken
up by the League. A permanent military commission had been established
by the Covenant to advise the Council, but it soon became evident that a
professional body was more easily impressed by the difficulties than by
the urgency of reducing armaments, and the first Assembly decided to
establish another body to include lay as well as service members which
became known as the Temporary Mixed Commission. The difficulties
were not at first generally realised. Disarmament was a popular cause,
on economic grounds, and because many believed that armaments were
an independent cause of war rather than a sign that wars were still possible.
The success of the Naval Conference of Washington in 192 1-2 was thought
by some to confirm the view that armaments could be dealt with in the
main as a technical question ; but in fact the Washington agreement was
possible only because political issues were concurrently settled, because
only the United States among the five powers that signed the agreement
was economically able to engage in competitive building, and because the
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scope of the agreement was limited to capital ships. The political context
of the League discussions was very different, for the lapsing of the United
States guarantee to France (and the resultant lapsing of the British guaran-
tee) in consequence of the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles
had strengthened the hands of those Frenchmen who believed that Ger-
many’s greater potential strength must be balanced by heavy reparations,
by a disparity in armaments, by alliances with the small countries of
eastern Europe, and by using the League as a means of keeping Germany
under control.
The political aspect of the disarmament discussions was accordingly
soon seen to be fundamental, and in 1923 the Temporary Mixed Com-
mission attempted a political approach in the draft of a treaty of mutual
assistance which ingeniously combined the system of regional alliances
which already existed and would, it was practically certain, have to be
accepted, with a general system of security. The Council was to have
power to determine an aggressor, but the obligation to use armed force
against aggression was limited to states on the continent on which it
occurred, and there was to be a guarantee for those states only which
agreed to disarm. The treaty was rejected by the British government for
various reasons, but chiefly because of the difficulty of reconciling the
regional basis of the obligations with the relations between members of
the British Commonwealth and with the world-wide responsibilities of the
British navy, and though the British was not the only rejection it was
decisive for the fate of the draft. The Assembly of 1924 therefore tried a
different approach. The rejected treaty would have set up a security system
side by side with that of the Covenant but on a different basis ; the Geneva
Protocol of 1924 accepted the Covenant, but sought to strengthen it.
Britain and France, which this year for the first time were represented by
their Prime Ministers, Ramsay MacDonald and Edouard Herriot, pre-
sented a joint resolution which became the basis of the Assembly’s work.
It was thought that a new key to the problem might be found in compulsory
arbitration, the acceptance of which would offer a quasi-automatic test of
aggression; in short, arbitration would make possible security, and
security would then lead to disarmament. Compulsory arbitration would
close the 4 gaps’ in the Covenant, for all disputes were to be settled by one
of the means proposed in the Covenant, in the last resort by arbitrators
whose decision would be final. Sanctions would thus be applicable to
every resort to war and not merely, as hitherto, to war in breach of the
Covenant. The whole plan, however, was to take effect only after a con-
ference had adopted a disarmament plan, and the complexity of that
problem was yet so little realised that it was proposed that the conference
should meet in the following year and that in the meantime the Council
should produce a draft plan for its consideration. In fact, it proved im-
possible to convene this conference until 1932.
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During the debates on the Protocol MacDonald’s Labour government
had been in power in Britain, but before the British attitude was declared
it had been succeeded by the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin,
and this decided to reject the proposals. It is unlikely that the change of
government affected the issue, for when the Protocol came to be examined
at leisure defects became apparent which had been overlooked or under-
estimated in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the Assembly. The claim of
its authors that it ensured the final settlement of all disputes without
exception was not justified by its terms; many of the most dangerous
disputes are those which arise out of matters which fall wit hin the domestic
jurisdiction of one of the parties or in which one of the parties claims
some advantage to which it has no legal right, and under the Protocol
these could only have been decided on the basis of the existing legal situa-
tion, leaving them to continue on the plane of interests even though dis-
posed of on that of law. Indeed, to some members of the League this was
one of the merits of the Protocol, for it seemed to place an obstacle in the
way of any revision of the territorial settlement. The new British govern-
ment's decision to reject the document was, however, confirmed by the
opposition of the Dominions, and, even had a Labour government been
willing to take greater risks with the Protocol than the Conservatives,
it could not have ignored this opposition. The reasons given by some of
the Dominions for their rejection of the Protocol were not well founded,
but their united opposition was significant of their fixed resolve on no
account to increase the sanctions obligations to which they had committed
themselves in the Covenant. The British rejection decided the fate of the
Protocol as it had that of the draft treaty of 1923, but it is improbable
that it could in any case have satisfied for long the demands of those
members of the League that felt themselves insecure. The guarantees that
it offered them were for practical purposes only those of the Covenant,
and France and the countries associated with her had never regarded these
as sufficient. It was founded on a diagnosis of the causes of the weakness
of the League which was fundamentally mistaken; that weakness was not
due to any juridical defect in the Covenant, but to the doubt whether, if
the challenge should come, the League powers would, or in the absence of
the United States whether they even could, confront an aggressor with
the overwhelmingly superior force on which an effective security system
depends.
Austen Chamberlain announced the rejection of the Protocol at Geneva
in a speech, of which A. J. Balfour was believed to be the author, which
caused some consternation by seeming to imply that in the absence of the
United States the enforcement provisions of the Covenant had become
unworkable. But he ended by suggesting that the Covenant might be
supplemented by special arrangements ‘knitting together the nations most
immediately concerned, and whose differences might lead to a renewal of
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strife, by means of treaties framed with the sole object of maintaining, as
between themselves, an unbroken peace’, 1 a cryptic formula which seemed
to foreshadow a new approach to the security problem. The speech was
made at a time when the prospects for a general pacification had been
greatly improved by the removal, at least for the time being, of the question
of German reparations from the field of controversy through the accept-
ance in the closing months of 1924 of the plan of the Dawes Committee,
and the consequent imminent withdrawal of the last French and Belgian
troops from the occupation of the Ruhr. The special arrangements which
Chamberlain had in mind clearly followed from a proposal by Gustav
Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister, for a multilateral regional
guarantee, and they took shape at the close of 1925 in the Treaties of
Locarno. The negotiations for these treaties necessarily took place outside
the League, since Germany was not a member, but the whole outlook for
the League was transformed by the reversal of the French policy of holding
Germany down by force majeure, the League being one of the means, if a
poor one, for this purpose. The main provisions of the treaties were that
France and Germany, and Belgium and Germany, undertook not to
resort to war against each other, that Britain and Italy would immediately
come to the help of the party attacked if this undertaking should be
broken and would guarantee the frontiers between Germany and France
and between Germany and Belgium, that commissions of conciliation
would be set up between Germany on the one hand and France, Belgium,
Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other, and that France, but not Britain
or Italy, would guarantee the frontiers between Germany and Poland and
between Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Locarno had a profound effect on the European situation and Austen
Chamberlain was justified in calling it ‘ the real dividing point between the
years of war and the years of peace ’. 2 But its importance did not lie in its
terms. Action under the British and Italian guarantees was to be automatic
only if violation of the treaties took the form of ‘flagrant’ aggression,
otherwise assistance was to be given only if the League Council confirmed
that a violation had occurred. France’s security was thus but little in-
creased, and the British refusal to extend their guarantee to the Polish and
Czechoslovakian frontiers with Germany denied the strategic unity of the
France-Eastern Europe-Germany complex on which the French had
hitherto, and rightly, always insisted. The importance of Locarno was
rather that it opened a prospect that the chief danger to the peace of
Europe, the age-long hostility between France and Germany, might at last
be assuaged. For the first time since the war Germany had made a nego-
tiated treaty with her former enemies ; she had accepted the loss of Alsace
1 League of Nations Official Journal, 6th year, no. 4: xxxm Cl., p. 450.
* Quoted in A. Wolfers, Britain and France between Two Wars (Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1940), p. 260,
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and Lorraine as final ; and it had been arranged that she should enter the
League and be elected to a permanent seat on the Council at a special
Assembly to be held in March 1926. Unfortunately a hitch occurred in
this arrangement at the last moment. Three other powers, Spain, Poland
and Brazil, came forward as candidates for permanent seats, and as Spain
and Brazil were already non-permanent members of the Council their
votes were necessary for the election of Germany. It was generally felt that
for any other member to be elected to a permanent seat would be a breach
of faith towards Germany, and the Assembly dispersed without having
reached any decision. Before the regular meeting of the Assembly, how-
ever, a compromise was arranged. The number of elected members of the
Council was to be raised to nine; there was to be a new class of semi-
permanent members who were to be re-eligible at the end of their normal
three-year term, and it was understood that Poland would be one of these.
Spain and Brazil withdrew their opposition to the election of Germany,
but gave notice of withdrawal from the League; Spain retracted her notice
before the two years’ interval required by the Covenant had elapsed, but
Brazil left the League.
The introduction of Germany into the League system as a great power
permanent member of the Council made the unilateral disarmament pro-
visions of Versailles anomalous, and accordingly the Final Protocol of
Locarno included an undertaking by the signatories ‘to give their sincere
co-operation to the work relating to disarmament already undertaken by
the League of Nations and to seek the realisation thereof in a general
agreement’. 1 In pursuance of this undertaking the Council in December
1925 set up a preparatory commission for the world conference which it
was still hoped to hold in 1926. The commission was, however, soon in
difficulties. It found that on many questions of fundamental principle
there was no sort of agreement among the states. Its technical sub-
committees wrestled vainly with matters which might seem technical on
the surface but were really rooted in widely divergent national interests.
Even on the question of what the term ‘armaments’ should include,
opinions differed widely: if military potential were to be included, all
elements of a state’s power — economic, geographic, demographic and
so on — would have to be considered, some of these could not be quantified,
and all were subject to changing values under the influence of scientific
and technological discovery; whilst to exclude war potential altogether
from the calculation would weight the balance heavily in favour of certain
states. Other questions on which opinion differed were whether only men
actually serving should be counted in a state’s military forces or whether
trained reserves should be included ; whether there should be a budgetary
limitation on the size of armaments; whether naval armaments should be
reckoned on a basis of total tonnage or by categories of ships; how far
1 League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. Liv, p. 299.
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some form of international supervision could be devised to watch over the
observance of any agreement that might be reached. There loomed also
behind all these particular differences the shadow of the known determina-
tion of certain states to demand a firmer guarantee of their security as the
price of any reduction in their armaments. The failure of the three chief
naval powers, the United States, Britain and Japan, at a conference in
June 1927 to reach agreement as to the limitation of non-capital ships
added a new source of discouragement. It began to be evident that the
preparatory commission was not far from a deadlock, but in 1928 an
event occurred outside the League which seemed to open up once again
the possibility of advancing towards disarmament by the political instead
of the technical line of approach.
Shortly before the meeting of the Assembly of that year the Pact of Paris
for the Renunciation of War, the so-called Kellogg-Briand pact, had been
signed in Paris, and League members were now in the rather anomalous
position of being parties to two systems for maintaining peace which were
in some respects inconsistent with one another. The pact forbade any
resort to war ‘as an instrument of national policy’, but the Covenant,
owing to the existence of the ‘ gaps ’, allowed this in certain cases ; the pact
declared that the settlement of disputes should never be sought except by
pacific means, but the Covenant did not absolutely ensure that every
dispute should be settled in this way or even that it should be settled at all.
If war, therefore, was now to be excluded, what, it began to be asked, was
to be done about disputes which could not be settled peacefully? These
questions had very little real importance, but on formal grounds there was
no doubt a case for implementing the pact either by incorporating it in
the Covenant or by setting up outside the Covenant a system for the
settlement of disputes which might perhaps be accepted by the signatories
of the pact who were not also members of the League. The former of these
courses would have involved the closing of the gaps and thereby extending
the sanctions to all wars, and, although the British government, departing
for once from its policy of refusing further commitments, supported a plan
to this effect, it was not accepted. Instead, the Assembly produced a plan
for implementing the pact without amending the Covenant by a General
Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes which provided
for conciliation commissions to be set up by each of the parties with every
other party, for legal disputes to be submitted to the Permanent Court and
non-legal disputes to arbitration. The Act was widely accepted, though in
many cases with extensive reservations, but it was completely ineffective.
It was a thoroughly doctrinaire document, prepared in haste and full of
ambiguities. The conciliation commissions which the Act proposed were
never found useful, and it was a retrograde step to substitute them for the
Council, which was what the framers hoped would be the effect of the Act.
For the Council had advantages which these commissions could never
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possess ; it had prestige, its members were men of international reputation
who were accustomed to working together, and it had means of informing
itself on the facts and the law of the cases brought before it which had
proved their value and which these ephemeral commissions could never
command.
The Kellogg-Briand pact thus after all did little to improve the political
context within which the preparatory commission for the disarmament
conference was working, and by the time it eventually succeeded in pro-
ducing a draft statement of principles in 1930 the general situation had
greatly worsened as a result of the onset of the world economic crisis in
1929 and the emergence of Hitler’s Nazis as the second largest party in
the Reichstag after the elections of 1930. Even the draft statement did
little more than set out the opposed positions on the issues in dispute,
with little indication of how they might be reconciled, and it was accepted
by a majority which did not include Germany, Italy or the U.S.S.R. The
situation soon deteriorated still further as Japan invaded Manchuria and
defied the League, but it was now thought to be impossible to postpone
the meeting of the long-delayed world conference fixed for February 1932
(see below, chapter xxm). From the outset, however, the German claim
to equality overshadowed all the debates at the conference, and in June
1932 Germany threatened to withdraw. In December the rift was tem-
porarily patched by an ambiguous formula which recognised in principle
both Germany’s right to equality and France’s right to security, but did
not show how the two were to be reconciled. Before the conference met
again Hitler had become Chancellor of the Reich, and a few weeks later
Japan gave notice of her intention to resign from the League, though she
continued to take part in the conference. Britain attempted to save the
conference from the impending wreck by presenting a new plan, to which
Ramsay MacDonald gave his name, and when the conference adjourned
for the summer of 1933 the plan after some difficult negotiations had been
accepted as a basis for future discussions. But on the day the conference
met again it was informed that Germany had withdrawn and was giving
notice of her resignation from the League. The conference was never
formally dissolved, but this was its death warrant. For the League the rise
of Hitler had another sequel a year later in a complete reversal of the
attitude of the U.S.S.R. In September 1934 the U.S.S.R. was elected to
the League, with a permanent seat on the Council, and from that date
until the outbreak of the second world war there was no more eloquent
advocate at Geneva of the principles of the Covenant than her representa-
tive, Maxim Litvinov.
For some years after the peace settlement the mentality of war persisted
over much of Europe, and the League, with no force at its command and
no accumulated reserve of prestige behind it, was often unable to make
its writ run when a state attempted to snatch by force or by fraud some
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advantage for itself and to face the world with a fait accompli. Its diffi-
culties were increased by the existence of rival authorities, first in the
Supreme Council of the Allies and later in the Conference of Ambassadors
which they had set up in Paris to deal with matters left outstanding by the
treaties. There was no clear demarcation of function between these bodies
and the League, and the latter sometimes found itself excluded from
matters which properly belonged to it, or else called in to deal with prob-
lems on which its rivals had been unable to agree and at a stage when they
had become nearly insoluble. The first dispute to be brought before it was
one between Sweden and Finland in 1920, and in this, which related to
sovereignty over the Aaland Islands, it succeeded in arranging a settle-
ment which both parties accepted. But a few weeks later a more difficult
case arose. A Polish free-lance commander, Zeligowski, had seized the
disputed city of Vilna in breach of an armistice which had left it in
Lithuanian possession; he was in fact acting, though this was denied at
the time, with the approval of the Polish government. The League Council
tried vainly to induce the Poles and the Lithuanians to agree to an inter-
nationally supervised plebiscite, but in the end, in 1923, the Ambassadors
awarded the city to Poland. Another successful act of aggression was the
seizure by Lithuania in January 1923 of Memel, which was held by the
Allies pending a decision as to its fate: by the time the matter was referred
to the League Council by the Ambassadors the seizure was virtually
accepted, but the Council was able to effect an arrangement which secured
a measure of autonomy to the mainly German inhabitants of the city.
In August 1923 the League machinery was called upon to deal for the
first time with an aggression by a great power. General Tellini, the Italian
member of a commission which had been surveying the Greco-Albanian
frontier on behalf of the Ambassadors, had been murdered, and the
Italians, without waiting for any enquiry into the circumstances, demanded
an indemnity from Greece and seized the island of Corfu after a bombard-
ment causing serious loss of life. The Greeks appealed to the League,
though declaring their readiness to accept any decision that the Ambas-
sadors might make and thereby providing Italy with some technical justifica-
tion for arguing that, as the dispute was in course of settlement by another
authority, the League should refrain from interfering. The Council, how-
ever, declined to accept this argument and proceeded to negotiate a
settlement under which the Ambassadors should investigate the responsi-
bility for the murder and the Permanent Court should determine what
compensation Greece should pay, 50 million lire being deposited pending
the decision. Both the Ambassadors and the two parties accepted this
settlement, but the matter of the Corfu seizure had not been dealt with,
and the Ambassadors suddenly decided that Greece should pay the
50 million lire forthwith. It was clear that this was the price Italy had
exacted for the evacuation of Corfu, that the seizure was not going to be
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considered, and that the League had been sidetracked. The Council had
not been able to hold the scales even between a strong and a weak power.
On the other hand it was widely felt that had the League not been in
existence the dispute might have led to general war, and, although Italy
had got much the best of it, none the less a great power had had to defend
itself at the bar of world opinion — and Mussolini did in fact handle his
relations with members of the League much more cautiously for the next
eleven years. The results of the incident therefore were not wholly dis-
couraging, and there seemed still to be a hope that with a fair field the
machinery of the League might prove effective, and this hope seemed to
be confirmed by the manner in which the League dealt with the next dis-
pute to come before it. In October 1925, in consequence of an incident on
the frontier between Greece and Bulgaria, Greek troops crossed into
Bulgarian territory and Bulgaria at once appealed to the League. Drum-
mond acted with speed and summoned the Council to meet within three
days. The Council’s President, Aristide Briand, confirmed this action and
telegraphed to the parties exhorting them to stop all military action. On
receipt of this telegram the Greeks countermanded an offensive they were
about to launch, and the Council meeting in Paris succeeded in obtaining
a cease-fire and proceeded to form a commission of enquiry to decide the
merits of the dispute. The commission reported that the Greeks were
largely at fault and the Council then fixed a sum which Greece was to pay
by way of reparation. The complete success of the League on this occasion
raised a hope that it had created a precedent which might be followed in
future cases with equally good results. But the circumstances had been
exceptionally favourable. Greece was a small power, the great powers had
for once been united, and there were no political complications. The
Council had acted much as the Concert had sometimes acted in the nine-
teenth century: Greece had been overawed and had submitted. Circum-
stances such as these were not destined to recur in the later history of
the League.
The years that followed the Dawes Plan and the Locarno treaties were
years of high promise for the League and there were signs that it had
established itself as a normal and necessary part of international relations.
The Foreign Ministers of the three principal League powers, Chamberlain,
Briand and Stresemann, found it worth their while to attend in person
practically every meeting of the Assembly or the Council, and the mutual
confidence that grew up amongst these three became an important stabi-
lising influence on the European situation. Most of the other European
foreign ministers followed their example and became regular attendants
at Geneva. The United States, though she showed no signs of being willing
to join the League, had begun to look more benevolently on its work and
to take part in many of its non-political activities, and in 1927 the U.S.S.R.
began to do the same. For some years no major crisis occurred to test the
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soundness of the League’s structure ; and, though none of the great contro-
versial questions — reparations, security, disarmament — had been solved,
in the friendlier atmosphere that had begun to prevail they were ceasing
to seem insoluble.
With the coming of the great economic depression of 1929 and the
following years, the League's short period of optimism came to an end.
In 1931 for the first time since 1923 it was faced with action by a great
power that soon came to be seen as a direct violation of the Covenant.
In September of that year Japanese troops guarding the South Manchuria
Railway attacked and rapidly disarmed the Chinese garrisons in Mukden
and neighbouring towns and drove out the provincial Chinese government.
They claimed to be acting in defence of their interests and nationals in the
South Manchuria Railway zone which were being threatened by China.
The reality of this threat seemed plausible, since the Kuomintang govern-
ment was bent on ridding China of foreign privileges and concessions,
among them those of other leading League members. Japan’s record in the
League had hitherto been excellent, and in the absence of accurate in-
formation her representative’s protestations were at first accepted at their
face value. By the end of December, when the Japanese army had com-
pleted its overrunning of Manchuria, and when the genuine asseverations
of the Japanese government that they intended no such thing had been
shown to be irrelevant to the action of the army, it was already too late for
effective action.
China had immediately appealed to the League under Article xi (see
chapter xxm). The Council’s first idea of sending a commission of enquiry
was abandoned in face of Japanese opposition and a United States refusal
to co-operate. The Council then endeavoured to persuade Japan to with-
draw her troops within the railway zone, and was assured that this would
be done. By mid-October, however, it was clear that, far from with-
drawing, the troops were still advancing, so on 24 October the Council
proposed to fix a date by which the withdrawal was to be completed. The
League’s position had, it seemed, been strengthened by the agreement of
the United States to allow a representative to sit in on the Council, but
the representative was instructed to speak only when matters arising from
the Kellogg-Briand pact were under discussion, and in fact he opened his
mouth only once after the initial courtesies attendant upon his appearance.
The Japanese delegate voted against the 24 October resolution and thus,
under recent views of Article xi, nullified its legal validity. The Article xi
conciliation procedure was thus shown to be wholly ineffective against
a great power determined to have its way. As a last resort in December
the Council belatedly decided to send a commission of enquiry of the five
major powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the United States),
Japan concurring once China’s sole condition that Japanese troops should
first be withdrawn into the railway zone had been overridden.
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Before the commission started the situation had deteriorated. Early in
1932 an anti-Japanese boycott and riots broke out in Shanghai, and Japan
retaliated by bombing and moving in troops which were not withdrawn
for several months. Three days earlier the Chinese had appealed under
Article xv, thereby confronting the League with the possibility of the
members finding themselves obligated to impose sanctions on Japan under
Article xvi. They asked also, as the Covenant entitled them to do, that
the appeal should be transferred to the Assembly, where the small powers,
who felt their safety to depend on effective collective security, were in a
large majority. A special Assembly met accordingly in March, resolved
that it would not recognise changes brought about by means contrary to
the Covenant or to the Kellogg-Briand pact, established a special com-
mittee to take over from the Council the task of seeking a settlement of
the dispute (the first time that a specific political problem had thus been
transferred), but decided, as it could hardly fail to do, to await the report
of the Lyttoncommisssion of enquiry (so named after its British chairman).
These many delays facilitated the maturing of the Japanese plans, and
when at last the commission arrived in Manchuria it learnt that Japan had
established a puppet government for a newly constituted ‘independent’
state of Manchukuo. The commission’s report was received in Geneva in
September and was considered successively by the Council and the
Assembly. It was an authoritative document, giving full and fair considera-
tion to the anomalous situation in Manchuria, but generally condemnatory
of the scale of the Japanese action, and insistent in particular that China
should be sovereign in Manchuria. The report was accepted in its main
lines by the Assembly in February 1933, and a month later Japan gave
notice of resignation from the League. There were, however, no means of
enforcing the terms of the settlement proposed in the report, and the
question of sanctions at this date simply could not arise even had the
Assembly found, as it did not, that Japan had resorted to war in disregard
of her Covenant obligations. But this was what she had in fact done.
Aggression had been committed with impunity. The confidence of the
smaller powers in the League had been gravely shaken, and a rift had
developed between them and the major powers. The weakness of the
collective security system as the great power members of the League were
prepared to operate it had been mercilessly exposed.
While the League was still dealing with the Manchurian affair its atten-
tion had also been turned to two outbreaks of hostilities in South America.
One of these arose out of a long-standing frontier dispute between Bolivia
and Paraguay in the Chaco area, and fighting began there in June 1932.
In May of the following year Paraguay formally declared war. A commis-
sion sent out by the League had no success, but the League did succeed
in arranging an embargo on the supply of arms, at first against both
belligerents, and later, after Bolivia had belatedly appealed to the League
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and offered to accept the recommendations of the Assembly, against
Paraguay only. The embargo, although the United States supported it,
was never completely effective, and each side in turn became obdurate as
the shifting fortunes of the war favoured its cause. Finally the war ended
in June 1935, not through any efforts of the League, but through the
exhaustion of both sides.
In the other South American dispute the intervention of the League
was more successful. In June 1932 a party of Peruvians, at first repudiated
but later supported by their own government, seized a strip of undoubted
Colombian territory near the village of Leticia and, Colombia having
appealed to the League, the Council adopted a report calling for the
immediate withdrawal of the Peruvians. There was a refusal to comply
at first, but a change of government occurred in Peru and the two parties
agreed to invite the League to send a commission to administer the dis-
puted area while the withdrawal took place.
But any hope that still remained that the security system might be
restored was destroyed by the war of 1935-6 between Italy and Ethiopia.
The relations between these two countries first came before the League
as a result of a clash between their troops in December 1934, at Walwal,
a place near the undelimited frontier between Ethiopia and Italian Somali-
land, when, on Italy’s demanding compensation, Ethiopia appealed to the
League under Article xi of the Covenant. At a meeting of the Council the
next month it was arranged that the matter should be referred to arbitra-
tors in accordance with a treaty between the two countries and that mean-
while consideration by the Council should be postponed. Italy delayed the
appointment of the arbitrators and the tribunal did not meet until July,
and in September it gave an award which exonerated both sides from blame.
But long before this the Walwal incident had lost all importance, for
Italy’s warlike preparations were on a scale which made concealment of
their purpose no longer possible, and as early as March Ethiopia had asked
to have the dispute considered under Article xv as being ‘ likely to lead to
a rupture’. Unfortunately her appeal coincided with the repudiation by
Germany of the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and
Britain and France were exceedingly reluctant to take any action which
might estrange Italy. The Council therefore several times postponed the
matter and it was still engaged in preparing a report which would have
contained the recommendations which it considered ‘just and proper’ for a
settlement when, on 3 October, the Italian troops invaded Ethiopia.
Thus when the war began the dispute had been before the League in
one form or another for about ten months, and there had been ample time
for the ‘cooling-off’ process, in which the founders of the League security
system had placed much confidence, to take effect. Here, however, the
system had to deal with an aggression for which, as the Italian commander-
in-chief, Marshal De Bono, later revealed, plans had been laid two years
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before, and the leisurely pace of the League had resulted not in a cooling
of tempers but in facilitating the completion of the aggressor’s arrange-
ments. Until September the repeated procrastinations of the Council under
British and French leadership caused growing despair among the now
numerous and vocal supporters of the League in many countries of the
world, including Britain. Mussolini’s expectation that no more would be
done than in the Manchurian affair was strengthened. But with a general
election due within a year the British government could not ignore public
opinion, and when the Assembly met in September the Foreign Secretary,
Sir Samuel Hoare, declared that Britain stood with the League ‘for the
collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety, and particularly for
steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression’. 1
Pierre Laval for France hesitantly and unconvincingly supported Hoare.
Mussolini’s decision to call the bluff by invading Ethiopia could not then
be ignored, and on 7 October each of the members of the Council, with
the exception of Italy, declared their government’s agreement with a
Council Committee’s report that Italy had ‘resorted to war in disregard
of its covenants under Article xn of the Covenant of the League of
Nations’. 2 Similar agreement was expressed in the Assembly on 9, 10 and
11 October by all members except Austria, Hungary and Albania (all
under Italian influence), and Italy. By expressing their individual agreement
with a report quoting words from the opening sentence of Article xvi, the
members of the League accepted also the obligation to apply sanctions, and
they proceeded to set up a committee to co-ordinate their further action.
Mussolini was almost certainly surprised by the speed and vigour of the
League’s reaction. He need not have feared. Literally applied. Article xvi
required the members of the League immediately to sever all trade and
financial relations with Italy, to prohibit intercourse with Italian nationals,
and to prevent all financial, commercial and personal intercourse between
Italians and the nationals of any other state whether a member of the
League or not. But the Co-ordination Committee decided instead of this
policy of complete non-intercourse to act under the Resolutions of 1921
(see above, p. 247). Members were advised in the first instance to ban
imports from and loans to Italy, and also the export of certain raw
materials; but these had the appearance of having been chosen so as not
too seriously to inconvenience the Italians, and they did not include an
embargo on oil, which, in the opinion of some competent judges, might
have had a decisive effect on their operations. It may have been thought
that, if time were given, the limited sanctions already being applied would
be effective even without an oil embargo, and it is also possible that public
opinion would sooner or later have forced the governments to impose it
in spite of the risks of reprisal that it might have involved. But in the
1 League of Nations Official Journal, Spec. Sup. no. 138, xvi Ass. p. 46.
8 League of Nations Official Journal, 16th year, no. 1 1 : lxxxix Cl., p. 1225.
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endeavour not finally to throw Italy into the arms of Germany the French
maintained a prolonged and successful delaying action and at the begin-
ning of May 1936 Ethiopian resistance collapsed thanks to the indiscrimi-
nate use of poison gas by the Italians on troops and civilians wholly
without protection against it. After that it was clear that nothing short of
military sanctions, which none of the major League powers was prepared
to use, would affect the issue. At a meeting of the Assembly on 4 July,
it was decided to lift the sanctions, and in December 1937 Italy gave notice
of resignation from the League.
This was the decisive defeat for the League security system, not merely
because there was far less excuse than in the case of Manchuria, but because
the coercive sanctions procedure had for the first time been invoked under
the influence of the high-sounding but hollow protestations of intent of
the leading League powers, Britain and France. It was no longer possible
to believe in the sincerity of their professed determination or in their will
to uphold the Covenant. Never again was it seriously suggested that the
peace enforcement provisions should be put into operation, and except
for the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. after her attack on Finland in December
1939 the League remained henceforth a passive witness of the aggressions
of the totalitarian powers. Its reaction to Hitler’s annexation of Austria
in 1938 was to strike Austria off the list of League members, and neither
Czechoslovakia in 1938, nor Poland in 1939, thought it worth while to
bring its case to Geneva. During these years there was a general feeling that
some revision of articles of the Covenant which it was clear that the
members did not intend to observe ought to be undertaken, and a number
of different suggestions were brought forward. But the fundamental ques-
tion at issue was whether the League should still be armed with some sort
of coercive powers, possibly on a regional instead of a universal basis, or
whether it should henceforth be merely a machinery for facilitating con-
sultation and co-operation. That issue was still undecided when the war
of 1939 broke out and no change had been made in the Covenant.
Supplementing these political and diplomatic means by which it was
hoped that peace might be achieved, the League developed a wide range
of activities in the field of international social and economic co-operation
which were in part inspired by the thought that the problem of war might
be attacked indirectly as well as directly by eliminating some of the causes
of friction that make wars more probable. The initiation of these activities
owed much to a famous pamphlet by General Smuts, The League of
Nations: A Practical Suggestion, in which he urged that the League should
be ‘part and parcel of the common international life of States. . .an ever
visible, living, working organ of the polity of civilization [functioning] so
strongly in the ordinary peaceful intercourse of States that it becomes
irresistible in their disputes . . . V Among the most important of the bodies
1 Quoted in Walters, History of the League of Nations, p. 59.
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constituted for these purposes was the International Labour Organisation
established with autonomous status by a special chapter of the peace
treaties. Its purpose was to further the improvement of conditions of
labour by international action. It comprised (a) a General Conference
consisting of four representatives of each member, two being government
delegates, and two, representing employers and work-people respectively,
chosen by governments in agreement with industrial organisations in their
respective countries. Its functions were the making of recommendations
for national legislation and the preparation of draft conventions requiring
to be ratified by states before taking effect; (b) an International Labour
Office, which was the secretariat of the organisation and was controlled
by a governing body consisting of twelve government, six employers’ and
six work-people’s representatives. Expenses were paid out of League funds,
and membership of the League carried membership of the organisation,
though non- League members might also be elected. It was happily shielded
by the nature of its work from the political storms which the main body
of the League had to meet, and it was significant for the development of
some degree of co-operation across national frontiers between employers
in different countries and between employees likewise.
A number of technical organisations were also set up under the general
authority of the League Assembly and Council. The first of these was one
on communications and transit, and in its main lines the constitution of
this becameamodel for the later ones. It consisted of a General Conference
which met at intervals of about four years and was composed of delegates
of the governments, not all of which were necessarily members of the
League; an Advisory and Technical Committee, meeting more often, and
composed of individual experts not representing their governments ; and
a section of the secretariat. The committee advised the League, and when
so requested individual governments, on matters within its competence;
it was available to be used as a conciliation commission for the settlement
of disputes on traffic questions ; and it conducted investigations and pre-
pared draft agreements for consideration by the General Conference. It
formed a number of specialist committees dealing with rail transport,
inland navigation, ports, electric power, and other special aspects of com-
munications. The General Conference promoted international agreements
on communications questions and from time to time it convened special
conferences on particular topics. The general object of the Organisation
had been laid down in Article xxiii (e) of the Covenant as ‘to secure and
maintain freedom of communications and of transit’, and though that
ideal was far from being realised it had some successes. Some of the con-
ventions which it promoted were accepted and put into operation, but
progress was less than it might have been, in part because matters of
communications have political implications, and partly because the
United States, the Soviet Union and Germany were unwilling to join
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in many arrangements which required world-wide agreement to be
effective.
In the economic field the League had some early successes in handling
some immediately urgent problems of reconstruction, notably in its work
in the rehabilitation of the finances of Austria. Various countries had made
relief loans to Austria, but these had served only as palliatives, there was
no possibility of further loans, and it had become clear that nothing but a
plan of radical reconstruction could avert a complete collapse of the
Austrian economy. It was essential, however, before any such plan could
be launched that states having reparation claims against Austria should
agree to their deferment so as to enable her to offer the security necessary
for any loan on an adequate scale. A special committee of the League
Council carried through the difficult negotiations which were necessary
for this purpose, and it was then able to put into operation a comprehen-
sive plan, under the supervision of a League commissioner, of retrench-
ment and budgetary reform. This brought about a rapid improvement in
the Austrian situation and kept the economy on an even keel until, with
most of the rest of the world, it was engulfed in the great economic break-
down of the middle inter-war years. A reconstruction scheme modelled
on that for Austria was later applied to Hungary.
The League was less successful in its efforts to introduce long-term im-
provements in the conduct of international economic relations. A general
tendency towards more nationalistic economic policies gained ascendancy
in the early 1920s, and against this the League could make little headway.
Moreover, the two most crucial matters of international economic policy
in the early years of the League were reparations and inter-Allied debts,
and from both of these it was excluded. The first important enterprise of
a general character was the organisation of a conference of financial
experts at Brussels to consider remedies for the monetary chaos left by
the war, but though the experts were practically unanimous in their
recommendations these would have required, as the report pointed out,
fundamental changes in the policies of nearly every state which govern-
ments were not willing, and perhaps not even able, to make. One result of
this conference was, however, a decision to turn the provisional committee
which had prepared it into a standing economic and financial expert com-
mittee with a section of the Secretariat to serve it. This was later divided
into two separate committees for finance and economics respectively. In
1927 a World Economic Conference was held at Geneva after long and
very thorough preparation, and this again resulted in an admirable report
and recommendations, but any chance there may have been of effect being
given to the recommendations was wrecked by the onset of the great
depression two years later. In an endeavour to handle the problems of the
depression a second World Economic Conference met in London in 1933,
but the opposed views of Britain and France about the measures that were
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necessary, and the reversal of policy by the United States in the middle of
the Conference, prevented any agreement being reached. Perhaps the most
valuable legacy left by the League in the economic field was the series of
studies and the collection and diffusion of economic information by its
Economic Intelligence Service. The League could diagnose the causes of
economic ills and prescribe the appropriate remedies, but it could not
force those remedies on the patients.
Probably the work of the Health Organisation was the most permanently
valuable of all the social services of the League. It began with the work of
an Epidemics Commission formed to combat an outbreak of typhus and
cholera which war and revolution had loosed upon eastern Europe, and
this commission was soon afterwards used to assist the Greek government
in the health problems arising from the influx of refugees driven from their
homes in Asia Minor by the Turkish victories there. A permanent Health
Organisation consisting of an Advisory Council of government representa-
tives, a smaller Health Committee of specialists, and a section of the
Secretariat, was created in 1923, and thereafter its work developed rapidly.
The Epidemics Commission was enlarged into a permanent epidemio-
logical service on a scale never before attempted for the collection of
information on certain diseases and its distribution to national and port
health authorities all over the world. Another branch of the Organisation’s
work was the standardisation of drugs, serums, vaccines and vitamins,
which is essential to efficient collaboration between scientific workers in
different countries, and the standards recommended have now been largely
incorporated into national pharmacopoeias. An important new subject
was taken up in 1935 when the Assembly asked the Organisation to
collaborate with the International Labour Organisation and the Inter-
national Institute of Agriculture in preparing a report on nutrition. When
this report was issued in 1937 it revealed in a startling fashion how vast
was the number of human beings who were either underfed or wrongly
fed, and it led to the setting up of national nutrition committees in many
countries to work towards the attainment of the standards recommended,
which incidentally were soon to be found useful in the framing of war
rationing schemes. Lastly the Organisation was able, when requested, to
advise and help particular countries desiring to improve their health ser-
vices ; China in particular received invaluable help of this kind in a com-
prehensive programme of reforms involving the reorganisation of her
quarantine service, the training of doctors and nurses, and the direction
of a campaign against cholera and smallpox.
There were many other more limited but important fields in which the
League promoted international co-operation. One great humanitarian
work of the early days was that of Dr Nansen, who became the League’s
commissioner for refugees in 1921 and devoted the last years of his life to
organising the resettlement of the scores of thousands of people who had
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lost their homes and nationalities through the war or the peace settlement.
On an appeal from the Greek government this work was extended to
grapple with the appalling problem created by the influx of more than
a million persons from Asia Minor after the Turkish victories in 1922.
Among the social evils attacked by the League were the traffic in women
and children, on which a conference was held and a convention reached
in 1921, and the traffic in dangerous drugs. The drug traffic created prob-
lems on which purely national measures had been found to be almost
wholly ineffective, because of the ease with which drugs may be smuggled,
and the profitableness of the trade. Its details were obscure, and the
League first set itself to collect the facts ; it then secured agreement on a
system of licences for the export from and the import into each country
of certain specified drugs, and this licensing system was then supplemented
by limiting the manufacture in the producing countries as closely as pos-
sible to medical and scientific needs. The administration of the scheme
was supervised by a Permanent Central Opium Board and an Advisory
Committee. The last of the technical agencies to be established was the
Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, of which the main purposes were
to develop international contacts and to build an international conscious-
ness among teachers, artists, scientists, authors and members of other
intellectual professions. Even more than the other organisations, the Com-
mittee on Intellectual Co-operation was hampered by scepticism on the
part of governments and by shortage of money.
The extreme parsimony of the financial provision that members of the
League were willing to make was indeed notable : the average annual cost
of the whole League, including the International Labour Organisation and
the Permanent Court, and including the capital expenditure on its buildings,
was about £1,600,000, of which the share of the United Kingdom was
about £150,000. In these circumstances it was remarkable that the League
was able, as the United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote, to
develop mutual exchange and discussion of ideas and methods to a greater
extent and in more fields of humanitarian and scientific endeavour than
any earlier organisation in history.
In the last years of the League the breakdown of the security system and
the hostility of the totalitarian powers made it necessary to change the
methods of working of the technical organisations. It had become useless
to plan the holding of large conferences or to hope for the conclusion of
conventions on matters of interest to states in general. Instead a practice
grew of holding meetings of limited groups of states or of individual
experts for the study of particular problems ; sugar and wheat were among
the subjects treated in this way. Interest shifted from the action of govern-
ments to the interests of the individual, and besides the question of nutri-
tion already mentioned questions taken up in this way included the causes
of economic and financial troubles, depressions, the trade cycle, the gold
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standard, and questions of hygiene and housing. There developed also
an opinion in favour of greater independence for the social and technical
organs, and on the eve of the second world war a committee under the
chairmanship of Viscount Bruce proposed that a new central committee
should be established to take over the responsibilities of the Assembly and
the Council for these bodies, including the approval of their plans of work
and their budgetary demands. A plan on these lines was subsequently
adopted in the Economic and Social Council which the Charter of the
United Nations constituted as one of its ‘principal organs’.
Outside its two great functions of promoting international co-operation
and achieving international peace the League had many and very various
duties placed upon it by the treaties of peace. It was given, for instance,
power to revise some few of the articles of the treaties and to settle some
differences of interpretation ; it had a part to play in settling the terms of
the agreements into which Germany was required to enter ; its consent was
necessary to any alienation of the independence of Austria. But apart from
particular acts such as these which it was required or empowered to per-
form it was given certain tasks of a continuing administrative character.
One of these, contained in the Covenant itself, was the supervision of the
mandate system, whereby colonies and territories of which the defeated
powers were being deprived ‘which are inhabited by peoples not yet able
to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern
world’ were to be placed under the ‘tutelage’ of more advanced nations
as ‘Mandatories on behalf of the League’ (below, p. 292). The Covenant
created a Permanent Mandates Commission to advise the Council and to
receive an annual report from each of the mandatory powers, and in
course of time this Commission accumulated a great store of experience of
colonial problems; its members, who were individuals appointed for their
special qualifications for the work and not as representatives of govern-
ments, learnt to appreciate the difficulties of colonial administration, and
the colonial administrators often found the suggestions and criticisms of
the Commission useful and came to realise that they were inspired by a
genuine wish to co-operate and not by any captious spirit. Neither the
Council nor the Commission had any power to coerce a mandatory power,
but on the whole the system worked well.
The League was less successful in another somewhat similar task, that
of supervising the observance of the Minorities treaties made between the
great powers and certain states, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania
and others, which owed either their independence or an enlargement of
their territory to the victory of the Allies. These treaties required the states
concerned to accord certain rights to racial, religious, or linguistic minori-
ties within their territories, and placed the observance of these rights under
the ‘guarantee’ of the League. But they gave the League no means of
enforcing this guarantee other than by the pressure of persuasion or
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publicity, and its effectiveness therefore tended to vary with the rise and
fall of the League’s own prestige. The Council evolved a procedure for
dealing with petitions from the minorities which was reasonably good in
view of the difficulties of the task ; it laid down rules as to the receivability
of petitions to be applied by the Secretariat, and it instituted a system of
standing committees to examine those found receivable and to decide
which of them it was necessary to bring before the full Council. This
procedure was more effective than has sometimes been supposed, for it is
usually judged by its failures, and these were publicly known; but when,
as often happened, a grievance was settled without being brought before
the Council, the matter was treated as confidential and the League did not
always receive the credit to which it was entitled. But a fully effective
system of minority protection is possible only if both the state in which
the minority finds itself and the minority have learnt to be tolerant of
differences, and in most of the countries with which the League had to
deal this condition was far from being realised. The treaties ran counter
to the sentiments of nationalism prevailing in most of the states bound by
them, and it is possible that they sometimes encouraged irredentist feelings
which could be represented as endangering the stability of the territorial
settlement. They were resented too because they were felt to mark an
inferior national status, especially since none of the great powers had been
subjected to similar obligations, and one of them, Italy, was notoriously
pursuing an opposite policy in the territories acquired from Austria-
Hungary. Confidence in the system naturally declined in the last years of
the League, and in 1934 Poland announced that she would no longer
recognise the jurisdiction of the Council in minority matters.
Another difficult task laid upon the League by the treaties related to
the settlement in the Danzig area. Danzig was a mainly German city, but
its situation close to the mouth of the Vistula made it the natural port for
Poland, as before the nineteenth century it had long been, and the obvious
place for a Polish access to the sea. The Allies therefore sought to reconcile
this important Polish interest with the principle of self-determination
which they had accepted as the basis of the settlement by detaching it from
Germany and constituting it a free city ‘under the protection of the
League’; its constitution was to be drawn up in agreement with a High
Commissioner appointed by the League, and it was then to be placed
‘under the guarantee’ of the League. The arrangement included pro-
visions limiting the autonomy of Danzig in the interests of Poland ; she
was to have the free use of the Danzig docks, to control the Vistula and
the railway system within the city, to conduct Danzig’s foreign relations,
and to include Danzig within her customs frontiers. A High Commissioner
resident in Danzig was to represent the League.
In view of the extreme complexity of the conflicting interests no settle-
ment had any chance of permanency unless it was accepted by both parties
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as definitive, or, failing that, if it were not backed by some powers of
enforcement. Neither of these conditions was satisfied. The High Com-
missioner’s function was to mediate in disputes and to act as a guardian
of the constitution, but he had no powers of government in Danzig; the
League heard appeals from his decisions, and when disputes were taken
to Geneva it often happened that a settlement was found possible in the
calmer atmosphere prevailing there. But neither the League nor its com-
missioner could enforce a decision if either of the parties was obdurate.
Fundamentally, Danzig-Polish relations were never more than one aspect
of the relations between Germany and Poland; when these were good the
affairs of Danzig ran smoothly; when German policy towards Poland
became aggressive they deteriorated. In the last years before 1939 Berlin
effectively assumed the direction of affairs in Danzig; the Nazi party had
step by step established a dictatorship over the city; and the treaty settle-
ment had completely broken down.
As compensation for the destruction of the coal mines of northern
France the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to renounce the govern-
ment of the Saar basin in favour of the League of Nations as trustee and
to cede its coal mines to France outright. The League was directed to set
up a governing commission of five persons — one Frenchman, one Saar-
lander, and three from countries other than France and Germany; and
after fifteen years a plebiscite was to be held to decide between the main-
tenance of the treaty regime, union with France, and reunion with Ger-
many, and if the latter were chosen Germany was to repurchase the mines
from France. The commission made a rather unpromising start ; the first
chairman was a Frenchman, and some of his colleagues were suspected
of a too Francophil bias. But even a perfectly constituted commission
might have been daunted by the difficulties of the task entrusted to it.
It had to organise an administration out of nothing in a politically back-
ward area; it had been imposed on a resentful population which was kept
in a state of perpetual unsettlement by the uncertainties of the plebiscite;
and it was exposed to a constant stream of hostile propaganda from
Berlin attempting to undermine its authority. With a change in the chair-
manship and the entry of Germany into the League in 1926 the atmosphere
improved and the commission succeeded in organising an honest and
highly efficient system of government under which the territory prospered
economically and financially. As the date of the plebiscite approached the
position again deteriorated, and after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933
the Nazis organised a reign of terror which seemed likely to make a fair
conduct of the plebiscite impossible. In the end, however, thanks to the
protection afforded at the last moment by an international force, the
plebiscite passed off without disorder in January 1935 and resulted in an
overwhelming vote in favour of reunion with Germany. On the whole
the commission had successfully discharged a very difficult task, and
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incidentally had demonstrated that an efficient international government
is not in all circumstances impossible.
After the meeting at which the U.S.S.R. was expelled in December 1939
the Assembly did not meet again while the war lasted, but the economic
and social work was carried on, though necessarily on a restricted scale,
and every effort was made to preserve the structure of the League and of
its institutions intact and to assure the continuance of essential work. The
International Labour Organisation moved to Montreal, the health section
and the Central Opium Board to Washington, and the economic, financial,
and transit work to Princeton, New Jersey. But as the war drew towards
an end it became clear that the League would be replaced by a new
organisation, and after the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations
at San Francisco the chief concern of those responsible for the destinies
of the League was to see that its activities were terminated in a manner
worthy of the part it had played in world affairs. Representatives of the
League and of the United Nations worked out a plan which was later
approved by the twenty-first and last Assembly. The buildings and the
Library at Geneva were transferred to the United Nations at an agreed
valuation to become its European headquarters ; the secretary-general was
directed to afford every facility for the assumption by the United Nations
of such of the non-political activities of the League as the new body might
decide to assume; the Permanent Court was formally dissolved and
replaced by a new International Court of Justice with a statute in almost
identical terms; and provision was made for the continued existence of
the International Labour Organisation as an autonomous institution in
close relation with the United Nations. The League was dissolved by a
resolution of the Assembly on 18 April 1946.
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THE MIDDLE EAST 1900-1945
M iddle Eastern history in the first half of the twentieth century
may be looked upon as the working out of a crisis in society and
politics — a crisis which began towards the end of the eighteenth
century and from which in the end no geographical area and no section
of society could remain immune. This crisis resulted from the contact
between the traditional Muslim society, which seemed devoid of vigour,
inventiveness and enterprise, and Europe, which was clearly in the ascen-
dant, militarily superior, and full of complacent self-confidence, energy
and reforming zeal. The initial European impact was military. From the
first decades of the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern governments were
becoming increasingly aware that European arms and military techniques
were superior to anything they could command, and they proceeded to
remedy their inferiority by the seemingly simple expedient of acquiring
European arms and copying European military organisation. In this way
they hoped both to parry the threat from Europe and themselves to threaten
those of their neighbours who were tardier or more inefficient in adopting
the new techniques.
But this exposure to European methods and ideas had many unexpected
and disconcerting effects. We may first consider the case of the Ottoman
Empire. Selim III (1787-1807) and Mahmud II (1808-39) between them
destroyed the traditional Ottoman Army and laid down the basis for a
European-model conscript army. Such an army required in turn a Euro-
pean-model centralised bureaucracy to administer it and, to lead it, a new
type of officer, trained in European techniques and exposed to European
ideas. But bureaucratic centralisation could not remain confined to military
affairs, and by the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of increasing
centralisation (and of the improved communications, such as the telegraph
and the railway, which made centralisation feasible), the Ottoman State
controlled its territory as it had seldom done in the past and regulated the
affairs of its subjects more minutely than ever before. The introduction of
European military techniques and administrative methods may then be
said to have given a new lease of life to absolutism in the Ottoman Empire,
and to have given a coup de grace to such intermediary orders and institu-
tions (for example the Janissaries, the craft and trade guilds and the auto-
nomous religious communities) as had provided an element of practical
constitutionalism to limit, effectively if informally, the utter plenitude
of power which the ruler of the traditional Ottoman polity in theory
enjoyed.
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This increase in centralisation and absolutism required a new type of
military officer and civil official trained in European military and admini-
strative techniques and exposed therefore to European notions concerning
politics and society. Since modernisation — which was initiated and carried
out by the sultan and his entourage — did not manifestly make the empire
better able to defend itself against European ambitions, this new class of
European-trained officials and officers became increasingly disaffected
towards the very regime which called them into being. They argued that
the ills of the empire could not be cured by the adoption of mere tech-
niques; that these ills could be cured only by the adoption of constitutional
parliamentary government, which they believed to be the real foundation
of European superiority. The first group successfully to promote these
views was that of the Young Ottomans. Led by a high official and minister.
Midhat Pasha, and exploiting a favourable conjunction of internal
political turmoil and external military threat, they persuaded the new
sultan, Abdul Hamid II, to promulgate in December 1876 a constitution
which provided for a parliament and made ministers responsible to it. The
first Ottoman parliament, with an elected chamber of 120 deputies, first
met in March 1877 only to be dissolved by the sultan less than a year
later, in February 1878. The sultan having prevented it from being put to
the test, the Young Ottoman contention that salvation lay in making
ministers responsible to a popular assembly and in encouraging local and
provincial self-government remained a mere argument, an unfulfilled
promise the ghost of which haunted the intellectual and official classes in
the three decades of Hamidian rule which followed.
The Hamidian period saw a continuation of the trends to modernisation
and centralisation which were dominant all through the nineteenth century
intheOttoman Empire. ‘ It would not be an exaggeration ’, writes Professor
Bernard Lewis, ‘that it was in these early years of the reign of Abdtilhamid
that the whole movement of the Tanzimat, of legal, administrative, and
educational reform reached its fruition and its climax. And so, too, did
the tendencies, already discernible under the Tanzimat regime, towards a
new, centralized, and unrestrained despotism.’ 1 One may in fact go on
to argue that it was the very success of Hamidian policies in promoting
education — both civilian and military — and in developing railways and
telegraphs which brought about the downfall of the regime. More and
more young men — eventually to become officers and officials — were ex-
posed to European-style education and ideas, and thus became disaffected
towards the regime which set up the schools and colleges in which they
were educated, while improved communications spread these ideas to
remote comers of the empire where they had hardly penetrated before.
As a result, scepticism about the legitimacy of the traditional Ottoman
institutions, a toleration, an expectation of change — whether peaceful or
1 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), pp. 174-5.
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violent — became widespread among the educated classes. Again, the in-
crease in centralisation and absolutism in the three decades of Hamidian
rule itself made easier the success of a coup d'etat, the authors of which
had now only to neutralise or topple the supreme authority in the state,
i.e. the sultan, for them in turn to gain control of the empire and its mili-
tary and administrative organisation.
This is what in effect happened in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
In July of that year a group of young conspiratorial officers in the Third
Army Corps stationed in Macedonia (with its headquarters in Salonika)
started a mutiny which rapidly spread in the Corps and in the Second
Army Corps stationed in Edirne. When it looked as though the troops
which the sultan dispatched from Izmir against the mutineers were in
sympathy with them, the sultan capitulated and on 24 July restored the
Constitution of 1876 as the Salonika officers had demanded. But it became
rapidly clear that the empire was not to be governed on constitutional,
parliamentary lines. Until April 1909 there was an uneasy and indecisive
sparring for power between the officers organised into a Committee of
Union and Progress and Abdul Hamid, whose position was of course
profoundly shaken but who still had some power and much influence.
Whether or not inspired and encouraged by him, soldiers of the First
Army Corps stationed in Istanbul mutinied on the night of 12-13 April,
crying that the religion was in danger. This provoked a so-called ‘Army of
Deliverance’ to march from Salonika on Istanbul, which they reached on
23 April. They crushed the counter-mutiny and the Committee of Union
and Progress deposed the sultan and reigned in his place. But it became
speedily apparent that autocracy was not transformed into constitutional
government ; rather the sultan’s power passed to the officers who had dared
to depose him. True, there were elections and there was a parliament, but
it was not the deputies who controlled the government; on the contrary it
was the government who manipulated elections and controlled the parlia-
ment. Power lay elsewhere ; it was held by the officers who had carried out
the coup d'etat of July 1908 and who had foiled the counter coup of April
1909. As was shortly to be seen, such power was not amenable to constitu-
tional limitation; gained through a coup d'etat, it could be destroyed —
not limited — only through a similar coup d'etat. In 1911 there was a split
within the Committee and opposition to its rule began to grow. The
Unionists therefore dissolved the Chamber of Deputies in January 1912,
and held a general election in which all but six of the returned members
supported the government. This election became known as ‘ the big-stick
election’. In July a group of officers known as the ‘Saviour Officers’
organised a movement in the army which succeeded in bringing down
the Unionist government. The sultan — Mehmed Reshad, Abdul Hamid’s
successor and now a mere figurehead — appointed a new government, ratify-
ing the choice of the ‘Saviour Officers’. The Unionist parliament was
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dissolved and new elections held. In January 1913 a group of Unionist
officers, led by Colonel Enver Bey (1881-1922), one of the authors of the
original coup in 1908, burst into the Sublime Porte, where the cabinet was
meeting, and in the fracas which ensued one of them shot the Minister of
War dead. The cabinet was forced to resign at the point of the gun, and, until
the end of the first world war, Unionist domination in the empire went
unchallenged and unquestioned. The yearning of the official and educated
classes for a modem constitutional parliamentary government thus finally
found fulfilment in the replacement of the sultan’s stable traditional auto-
cracy by unstable military rule in which rulers gained and maintained
their position by a constant and ready appeal to the sword. We may say
in retrospect that for the Ottoman Empire and its successors the events of
1908-14 have an archetypal significance. They establish a modem and
now familiar pattern of army intervention in politics— intervention planned
and carried out by young officers in the belief that the European ideologies
which inspire them can provide remedies for their political and social ills.
These events also exemplify the crisis in representation which has in-
creasingly overtaken Middle Eastern politics. The traditional rulers shared
the same universe of discourse with their subjects, and in the course of the
centuries autocracy had come to be mediated or tempered or checked by
intermediate bodies which had either — like the millets — been instituted
by the authorities for ease and convenience of government, or, like the
Janissaries, arrogated to themselves, owing to the decay of the ruling
institution, a quasi-independent position in the state. The officers and
officials who now began to carry out coups d'etat were isolated by their
European ideas from the still traditional society the fate of which they were
resolved to shape and direct. Again, the new centralised absolutism, of
which these officers were the product and outcome, largely destroyed or
emasculated the traditional intermediate bodies which had effectively if
informally ‘represented’ the main interests of society and had served as
their link with the central authority. In the European-style elections indi-
vidual voters elected the candidates agreeable to the authorities, and the
resultant parliaments could neither control nor check the government
which had brought them into being. Representative institutions in fact
signified an actual decrease of representativeness in the Ottoman body
politic.
The other Middle Eastern state which proclaimed a constitution before
the first world war was Iran. The conditions here were utterly different
from those obtaining in the Ottoman Empire. Iran had not been touched
by European influences during the nineteenth century to anything like the
same extent as the Ottoman Empire, and had certainly not been subjected
to that sustained and radical westernisation which the Ottoman sultans
from Mahmud II to Abdul Hamid had initiated and carried through. The
Iranian army, in particular, remained weak and backward, quite useless in
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war against an external enemy and hardly more useful in maintaining
internal security. The most successful attempt at modernising the army
had been that of Nasir al-Din Shah (i 848-96). In 1 879 he engaged Russian
officers to train and command a Persian Cossack Brigade which until the
reforms of Riza Shah (1925-41) remained practically the only modem —
and effective — military formation in Iran. As a large modernised army
did not exist, so its fateful concomitant, a numerous and important class
of European-trained army officers, was likewise absent. By the same token,
Iran remained an old-fashioned Oriental despotism, largely innocent of
the centralised and levelling absolutism which was the consequence of the
Ottoman reforms.
But of course Iran could not remain immune from European influence,
whether political, economic or intellectual. Russia and Great Britain con-
fronted each other in Iran as elsewhere in central Asia and were always
seeking to establish and increase their influence and destroy that of their
rivals. The European economy, world-wide in its extension, sooner or
later brought Iran within its network through the activities of financiers
and concession-hunters. The telegraph, first introduced in 1858 and ex-
tended after 1862 into a large network by a British concern, the Indo-
European Telegraph Company, may stand as a symbol and index of the
steady and cumulative increase of European influence in Iran. Beyond all
these was the intellectual ferment which contact with Europe created and
which until the last decade of the nineteenth century affected a few, albeit
an influential few, of the learned and official classes.
The disturbance which European activity and European influences
created in Iran is indicated by the so-called tobacco protest of 1891-2.
Iran had known internal disturbances during the reign of Nasir al-Din
Shah, the most serious of which were those messianic uprisings which the
Babis fomented in the first years of his reign; but the tobacco protest had
certain new features lacking in traditional agitations — which were to recur
in the events leading to the grant of a constitution in 1906. The increasing
intercourse between Europe and Iran had opened to the court and the
official classes new vistas in the acquisition and consumption of wealth,
and the grant of concessions — usually monopolistic — to exploit one or
other of Iran’s resources seemed an easy and painless way to acquire a
substantial income. In 1890 the shah granted to a British concessionaire
a monopoly of the production, sale and export of Iranian tobacco. The
concession aroused widespread opposition in the country and it is interest-
ing to examine which groups in Iranian society initiated and organised
this opposition. The monopoly was seen as a threat to their interests by
the native merchants and moneylenders, and they were prompt in voicing
their objections. They were supported by the ulama, whose Shi’ism did
not enjoin the same utterly passive obedience to the earthly ruler which
was current in areas of Sunni dominance. Twelver Shi‘ism, established as
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the official religion of Iran since Safavid times, considered the twelfth
descendant of the Caliph Ali who had vanished in infancy as the legitimate
ruler of the Muslim community, the Hidden Imam who would one day
return to establish a reign of righteousness. In the meantime the authority
to interpret the Holy Law was vested in the mujtahids, the theologians
who, by their knowledge of holy writ and of precedents, are qualified to
express the intentions of the Hidden Imam. The temporal ruler, whose
authority would disappear at the coming of the Hidden Iman, was there-
fore bound to respect the authority of these mujtahids and to defer to their
pronouncements. Two other features of Shi‘ism served to enhance the
position of the ulama and to make their concerted opposition to the ruler
formidable. In the first place, some of the most revered shrines of Shi'ism,
Karbala, Najaf and Kazimayn, lay in Ottoman Mesopotamia outside the
control of the shah, and in them were to be found some of the most
eminent mujtahids of the Shi‘a world whose pronouncements would receive
the ready and respectful acquiescence of the devout masses. And it is this
popular devotion which, in the second place, gave the Iranian ulama
influence and power in Iranian society. In the tobacco protest, these
ulamas, fortified by fatwas emanating from mujtahids in Iran and Meso-
potamia, exerted their influence — which proved decisive — against the con-
cession. Their power was shown to be such that when they declared a
boycott of tobacco and prohibited all forms of smoking, their prohibition
was universally obeyed. The ulamas no doubt acted out of dislike for
infidels and foreigners whose ways and whose ideas they shrewdly sus-
pected of subverting sooner or later the traditional religion. As the struggle
against the shah showed signs of being successful, they no doubt also came
to enjoy this demonstration of their power and influence. The third group
which worked with the merchants and ulama in organising and sustaining
the agitation was rather different, less numerous and seemingly less power-
ful, but in retrospect it proves to have been the most significant. This
group believed that the ills of Iran originated in its traditional institutions
and that the only efficacious remedy was a radical one. In other words,
these were the westemisers who were themselves westernised whether at
first- or at second-hand. The Iranian westernisers, necessarily drawn from
the official and intellectual classes, were a small group who began to
propagate their views in the last decade or so of Nasir al-Din’s reign. But
they had to proceed very circumspectly, for, in a country where religion
still had such a strong hold, a damaging charge of heresy could easily be
levelled against them. To parry such a threat it would seem that some of
them at any rate deliberately adopted the tactic of presenting their
European notions in a Muslim garb. One of the most prominent of
these reformers, Malkam Khan, openly discussed these tactics in an
article on ‘Persian Civilisation’, published by The Contemporary Review
in 1891.
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As then Islam. . . [he wrote] is an ocean in which are accumulated all the sciences of
the past times of Asia . . . then for any new law or new principle you wish to promul-
gate, you can find in that ocean many precepts and maxims which support and
confirm what you want to introduce. As to the principles which are found in Europe,
which constitute the root of your civilisation, we must get hold of them somehow,
no doubt; but instead of taking them from London or Paris, instead of saying this
comes from such an ambassador, or that it is advised by such a government (which
will never be accepted), it will be very easy to take the same principle, and to say
that it comes from Islam, and that this can be soon proved. We have had some
experience in this direction. We found that ideas which were by no means accepted
when coming from your agents in Europe, were accepted at once with the greatest
delight when it was proved that they were latent in Islam. I can assure you that the
little progress which we see in Persia and Turkey, especially in Persia, is due to this
fact, that some people have taken your European principles, and instead of saying
that they came from Europe, from England, France or Germany, have said: ‘We
have nothing to do with Europeans; these are the true principles of our own religion
(and, indeed, that is quite true) which have been taken by Europeans! ’ That has had
a marvellous effect at once.
This again was exactly the tactic which his associate, the famous Jamal
al-Din al- Afghani (1838-97), pursued in Iran and elsewhere. For these
modernisers the protest against the tobacco concession could be widened
into a protest against the regime as a whole and could be made the occasion
for demanding a limitation of the shah’s power.
These three groups, then, merchants, men of religion and modernisers,
though their motives were certainly not identical, found it possible to
act in concert. Their agitation, thanks to the telegraph, spread across the
whole of Iran. Supported by the Russians, who were afraid that the tobacco
monopoly would increase the power and influence of their British rivals,
it succeeded in eliciting a popular response such that the shah had no
alternative but to cancel the concession.
The cancellation was a great blow to the authority of the regime. By
giving in so unconditionally to pressure and popular agitation it cast
doubt on its legitimacy and implicitly admitted the charges of despotism,
greed and corruption which the more extreme of its critics had made. The
tobacco protest publicised grievances which were to be heard again in
1905-6, when a constitution was granted, and it made familiar the notion
that the shah and the government could be checkmated and perhaps over-
thrown by a popular uprising. The murder of Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896
showed the influence of the ideas spread during the tobacco protest, and
the murder itself gave them further currency. The shah was murdered at
the instigation of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani by a follower of his, Mirza
Muhammad Riza. The murderer was essentially a simple man and politi-
cally quite unsophisticated. What he had to say in justification of his deed
is therefore quite striking. He had murdered in the first place to avenge
Afghani, * that holy man and true descendant of the Prophet ’, whom the
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shah had seized and forcibly deported from Iran in 1891 ; but what moved
him even more was the spectacle of
thousands of poor Persian subjects who have fled from their own dear country from
the hands of oppression and tyranny, and have perforce adopted the most miserable
means of earning a livelihood. . .After all [he went on] these flocks of your sheep
need a pasture in which they may graze, so that their milk may increase, and that
they may be able both to suckle their young and to support your milking; not that
you should constantly milk them as long as they have milk to give, and, when they
have none, should devour their flesh from their body. Your sheep are all gone and
scattered: this is the result of tyranny which you see.
For these reasons he had murdered the shah, and in no uncertain words
threatened that, if Nasir al-Din’s successor did not mend his father’s
way, he would suffer the same fate : ‘ If . . . he likewise adopts this practice
and conduct, then this crooked load will never reach the halting-place.’
When asked how he could reconcile his anxiety for his country with a deed
which could possibly precipitate disorder and confusion, he replied : ‘ Yes,
that is true, but look at the histories of the Franks : so long as blood was
not shed to accomplish lofty aims, the object in view was not attained.’
Under Muzaffar al-Din Shah (1896-1907) the same conditions which
led to the discontent of merchants, ulama and modernisers continued and
perhaps worsened. Iran was becoming more and more embroiled in foreign
debt, to service and to repay which required more revenues. This strained
the Iranian fiscal system and evoked loud protests against foreign exploita-
tion, official corruption and maladministration. Secret societies, or anju-
mans, became active. They were dedicated to the spread, particularly
among the intellectual and official classes, of reforming and modernising
notions. In 1904, in particular, various groups decided to come together
and concert measures for the overthrow of despotism. A secret meeting
of some sixty persons held on 28 May 1904 agreed on a programme of
action consisting of eighteen articles, the sixteenth of which speaks of ‘the
bringing about of revolution’. The modernisers, as has been said, were
always very careful to avoid any imputation of heresy, and it is interesting
in this connection to note that article 14 of this programme required that
whatever was circulated by the committee should conform to the laws of
Islam so that no member could be accused of heresy, and article 1 7 required
members not to take part in other than Islamic religious assemblies.
Shortly afterwards, in February 1905, another group, known as the Secret
Society, was formed the object of which, as stated in its programme, was
to awaken the people to their rights, to remove tyranny and to seek ways
of reforming abuses. In 1905 discontent came to a head, and there was
widespread and open agitation against the shah, his ministers, and against
Russian influence which was great and increasing. The Russo-Japanese
War of 1904, in which a Christian European power was signally defeated
at the hands of an Oriental power, and the revolution in Russia which
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followed the war, no doubt contributed to the effervescence, but the
specific grievance which set in train the events leading to the grant of a
constitution was the introduction of a new customs tariff in 1903 which
the merchants considered onerous and oppressive. In 1905 the tariffs were
enforced with greater severity and there were protests in various cities.
In particular, a group of Tehran merchants took sanctuary in the shrine
of Shah Abd al-Azim near the capital, whence they demanded redress for
their grievances. The shah was then abroad, and his heir, who was acting
as regent, pacified them by promising redress upon the shah’s return. In the
ensuing months tension between government and people in the capital as
well as in the provinces did not abate. Incidents indicative of this tension
were the ill-treatment of a mulla by the governor of Qazvin, the administra-
tion of the bastinado on the orders of the governor to a prominent religious
leader in Kirman, and the firing by a troop of soldiers on a crowd demon-
strating against the governor of Mashhad. These incidents in turn further
exacerbated the situation. In December the Prime Minister accused some
merchants of having raised the price of sugar; he seized them and had
them bastinadoed. This led a group of merchants to protest by taking
sanctuary in a Tehran mosque, where they were joined by a number of
prominent ulama and their popular following. From this mosque they
were expelled by a crowd at the instigation of another mulla, who was on
the side of the authorities. The protesters and their following thereupon
left the city for the sanctuary of Shah Abd al-Azim, where at the end there
were some two thousand of them. A month afterwards there was still no
prospect of their being dislodged. There they were, financed, provisioned
and encouraged by their friends and perhaps also by prominent men who
wanted to intrigue against the Prime Minister. To put an end to a state of
affairs injurious to his authority and prestige, the shah issued an auto-
graph letter to his Prime Minister which promised equality before the
law, a code and the setting up of a ministry of justice to supervise its
execution. This was presumably in response to a demand which one of the
secret societies had made public the previous day. The shah’s promise
satisfied the protesters and they returned to Tehran. But it soon appeared
that the promises were not being implemented and the agitation revived.
The secret societies and the ulama who sympathised with them denounced
despotism and put continuously before the public the shah’s unfulfilled
promise. In June, the Prime Minister tried to expel from Tehran two
influential preachers; riots ensued and once again a large number of
ulama, merchants and others took sanctuary, this time in Qum; the
merchants and artisans of Tehran went on strike and the bazaars were
closed; on 19 July another group took sanctuary in the gardens of the
British Legation and so many joined them that by the beginning of August
it was estimated that some 12,000 were camping in the gardens. Just as he
felt compelled to give in on the previous January, so now again the shah
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retreated, dismissed his unpopular Prime Minister, and on 5 August issued
a rescript setting up a national consultative assembly. Elections were held
in September, and on 7 October the shah opened the assembly. It speedily
proceeded to draft and vote on a Fundamental Law which the shah signed
on 30 December. A supplementary Fundamental Law was promulgated
on 7 October 1907.
When the agitation first began it was directed against financial and
fiscal oppressions, and what its leaders openly demanded was the promul-
gation of a code of laws and reform in the administration of justice. The
setting-up of constitutional and representative government may therefore
be seen as the result of the shah’s dilatory tactics which in the end left him
no room for manoeuvre. A constitutional representative government was
probably what the modernisers and westernisers really desired, and they
skilfully exploited the shah’s weakness and impolicy. The Fundamental
Laws of 30 December 1906 and their Supplement of 7 October 1907 pro-
vide examples of two incompatible outlooks within the Opposition — the
Muslim traditionalist and the European modernist— and show that it is
the modernist outlook which clearly prevailed. The traditional strain is
exemplified in article 1 of the Supplementary Laws, which establishes
Islam according to the Ja’fari sect (i.e. Twelver Shi'ism) ‘which faith the
Shah of Persia must profess and promote’. Article 2 is yet more un-
ambiguously traditionalist. It states:
At no time must any legal enactment of the Sacred National Consultative Assembly,
established by the favour and assistance of His Holiness the Imam of the Age (may
God hasten his glad Advent!), the favour of His Majesty the Shahinshah of Islam
(may God immortalise his reign!), the care of the Proofs of Islam [i.e. the mujtahids]
(may God multiply the like of them!), and the whole people of the Persian nation,
be at variance with the sacred principles of Islam or the laws established by His
Holiness the Best of Mankind [i.e. the Prophet Muhammad] (on whom and on
whose household be the Blessings of God and His Peace!).
The article went on to require the establishment of a committee of five
theologians to whom proposed legislation would be submitted and who
had the power to
reject and repudiate, wholly or in part, any such proposal which is at variance with
the Sacred Laws of Islam, so that it shall not obtain the title of legality. In such
matters [the article went on] the decision of this Ecclesiastical Committee shall be
followed and obeyed, and this article shall continue unchanged until the appearance
of His Holiness the Proof of the Age [i.e. the Hidden Imam whose reappearance will
inaugurate the reign of Justice] (may God hasten his glad Advent!).
In contrast with this article, which from the outset remained inoperative,
the Constitution abounded in provisions unmistakably European in
provenance which clearly showed the influence of the westernisers. The
second paragraph of the preamble to the Fundamental Laws, for instance,
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spoke of the right the shah was conferring on ‘each individual of the people
of our realm’ to participate in choosing by popular election the Members
of the National Consultative Assembly. Article 2 of these Fundamental
Laws asserted that the Assembly represented ‘ the whole of the people of
Iran, who thus participate in the economic and political affairs of the
country ’ ; article 8 of the Supplementary Laws, again, affirms : ‘ The people
of the Iranian Empire are to enjoy equal rights before the Law ’ ; article 26 :
‘The powers of the realm are all derived from the people’ and article 35:
‘The sovereignty is a trust confided (as a Divine gift) by the people to the
person of the Shah.’ This notion of a state composed of ‘ individuals ’ each
of whom is endowed with ‘ rights who are the source of public authority
and who bestow ‘ sovereignty ’ on the ruler, is of course utterly at variance
with the traditional Islamic theory of government. Equally at variance
with both practice and theory was the separation of legislative, judicial
and executive power which the Constitution enjoined, and the responsi-
bility of ministers to the Assembly which it also prescribed.
As the sequel showed, it was hardly to be expected that a Constitution
of this character, promulgated in such circumstances, could possibly
operate in a country like Iran in a manner even remotely resembling the
intentions and hopes of its authors. Muzaffar al-Din opened the Assembly
on 7 October 1906. He died the following January and his son Muhammad
Ali Shah (1907-9) succeeded him. From the start it was clear that he and
his ministers were utterly opposed to the Assembly and that Russia was
taking his part in the dispute . The authority of the shah having been seriously
shaken and that of the Assembly hardly established, the maintenance of
law and order became very difficult. Disorder broke out in the provinces
and the authority of government disappeared. In August the Prime
Minister, pro-Russian and opposed to the Constitution, was murdered by
a member of a secret society. In December the shah, by arresting the new
Prime Minister and other ministers who were in favour of the Assembly,
tried to reassert his own unfettered power. Popular clamour in Tehran
and the provinces foiled him for the time being. In February 1908 a bomb
was thrown at his motor car, but the shah escaped. In June the Cossack
Brigade bombarded and cleared the Assembly. Prominent popular leaders
were arrested and two of them strangled without trial. On 27 June the
shah dissolved the Assembly and abolished the Constitution as being
contrary to Islamic law. Thereupon the anjumans of Tabriz, the capital of
Azerbaijan, rose in rebellion, ousted the shah’s men and held the town for
some nine months, keeping a besieging force at bay. Other movements
against the shah were organised from Rasht and from Isfahan. From the
latter city a force of Bakhtiari tribesmen marched on the capital and,
effecting a junction with a force from Rasht, entered Tehran on 13 July
1909. On 16 July Muhammad Ali, having taken refuge in the Russian
Legation, abdicated. He was formally deposed at a meeting of the
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Assembly that same evening and his twelve-year-old son Ahmad Shah
(1909-25) proclaimed his successor.
Towards the end of 1909 elections for the second legislative session
were held and the assembly met on 5 December 1909. Its record was quite
as chequered as that of the first session. The Bakhtiari chieftains who
were now preponderant in the government did not exactly have constitu-
tionalism at heart; the country was in turmoil and the Russians ready to
exploit the opportunity in order to establish and extend their position in
the country. Some eighteen months after the inauguration of the second
legislative session, in June 1911, matters came to a head. The ex-shah
attempted to regain his throne by landing in Iran and fomenting a rebellion
in which he was joined by Lur and Turkoman tribes whom he had tempted
to his side. The rebellion was put down and the ex-shah forced to flee.
But these events caused more disorder and anarchy in the country. To
safeguard their interests in the south, the British landed troops in Bushire.
The Russians took the opportunity to reinforce the troops they had
stationed in the north ever since the summer of 1909. In May 1911 an
American, Morgan Shuster, had been appointed Treasurer-General of
Iran. This displeased the Russians, who began applying pressure on the
Iranian government. This culminated in a forty-eight hours’ ultimatum
delivered on 24 November which demanded Shuster’s dismissal. The
government, knowing itself powerless to resist the Russians, wished to
comply, but the Assembly wanted to resist. The government which had
issued from the Bakhtiari march on Tehran in 1 909, the object of which had
been to re-establish the Constitution, now broke the deadlock by forcibly
disbanding the Assembly and suspending the Constitution. This was prac-
tically the end of constitutionalism in Iran until the end of the second
world war. Ahmad Shah attained his majority in July 1914; the opportu-
nity was taken to resume parliamentary government. But the third legisla-
tive session met in the shadow of the first world war, which affected Iran
in various disagreeable ways. The Germans and their Ottoman allies
naturally did what they could to arouse opposition to the Russians and
the British. Their task was made easy among the official and intellectual
classes by Russian and British unpopularity, which stemmed from the
constant intervention of these powers in Iranian politics during the past
decade. German activities naturally elicited a Russian reaction. In
November 1915 Russian troops seemed to be advancing on Tehran;
the Assembly therefore broke up and most of its members fled to Qum.
The Assembly was not to meet again until 1921. By then, the war and its
aftermath had wreaked havoc with the government of Iran and had thrown
up various contenders for power whose instincts and methods were cer-
tainly not constitutional. One of these contenders, Riza Khan, an officer of
the Cossack Brigade, made himself master of the country by a military coup
d'etat and had himself proclaimed shah in 1925. Riza Shah ruled from
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1925 to 1941 as an unchallenged despot. During his reign the Assembly
met regularly, but it was no more than a decorative appendage of the
regime.
The record of the two other constitutional regimes in the Middle East
during this period was hardly more brilliant. Constitutionalism in the
Ottoman Empire and in Iran was the outcome of a native movement of
opinion, of a local reaction to the European challenge. In these two states
constitutionalism may have been helped or hindered by the policies of the
European powers. In Egypt and in Iraq, however, constitutional govern-
ment was introduced and advocated by a European power, Great Britain.
Egypt had been under British occupation since 1882 and since 1883 had
been endowed with a Legislative Council and a Legislative Assembly, the
functions of which were almost purely consultative. In 1913 the Legislative
Council was abolished and the powers of the Legislative Assembly some-
what increased, but owing to the war its sittings were suspended in 1915
and never resumed. The aftermath of war saw Egypt plunged in an agita-
tion against the British occupant, who had proclaimed Egypt a Protectorate
in 1914. The British government eventually gave away to this agitation, and
by the Declaration of 28 February 1922 recognised Egyptian independence.
In 1914 Egypt was formally an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire
and its ruler had the title of khedive, a title bestowed by the Ottoman
sultan. To symbolise Egypt’s changed status under the Protectorate, the
title of Egypt’s ruler was changed to sultan, and to symbolise the era
inaugurated by the Declaration of 28 February 1922 the ruler’s title was
once again changed — to king ( malik ). Egypt was to become a constitutional
kingdom endowed with representative institutions and a responsible
government. In April 1922 a committee was appointed to draft a constitu-
tion, and in October it submitted a draft which affirmed that sovereignty
belonged to the Egyptian people, and which provided for elections and a
parliament to which ministers would be responsible. King Fuad, who had
unexpectedly become sultan on the death of his brother in 1917 and whose
autocratic proclivities were well known, objected strenuously to the draft
Constitution. He succeeded in making numerous changes which increased
his own powers, and it was only after much pressure by Allenby, the
British High Commissioner, that he approved the Constitution in its
emasculated form in April 1923. Whether this or any other constitution
would have been promulgated without British pressure is mere speculation,
but it remains true that the British thought it necessary and desirable to
press Fuad to grant a constitution. We may therefore conclude that they
believed it feasible for an independent Egypt to become a constitutional
monarchy with a representative and responsible government. The political
history of Egypt under the monarchical constitution in fact continuously
and systematically belied these expectations. The reason was the very same
which accounted for the ill-success of Ottoman and Iranian constitutional-
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ism, namely that western-style elections and representative institutions
were incapable of representativeness and therefore incapable of providing
constitutional and responsible government. Elections in Egypt under the
monarchy, far from determining the character of the government in Cairo,
were themselves determined by whichever faction happened to dominate
the Cairo political scene. In 1923 the elections were overwhelmingly won
by the Wafd, a populist movement created and controlled by Sa‘d Zaghlul,
who, inspired and instigated by Fuad in 1918, had challenged the British
Protectorate. In 1923 he had the benefit of the king’s support because his
rivals had Allenby’s support ; it was indeed on behalf of these rivals that
Allenby had pressed an unwilling Fuad to approve the Constitution.
Zaghlul formed a government and during his period in office tried, by
means of demonstrations and similar expedients, to intimidate Fuad into
conceding him the primacy in the state. But his government lasted barely
a year. The British Governor-General of the Sudan was murdered in
November 1924 by terrorists connected with the Wafd. Zaghlul resigned
and Fuad dissolved the parliament. He appointed a non-Wafdist ministry
which immediately proceeded to conduct new elections. They resulted in
a draw as between Zaghlul’s supporters and the government’s men. This
was the only election under the constitutional monarchy the results of
which did not correspond perfectly with the desires of whichever party
happened to be dominant at Cairo. The reason for this undoubtedly was
that the new government did not have enough time to destroy or neutralise
Wafdist organisation which Zaghlul had been able to consolidate during
his period in power. The new parliament met once in March 1925 and was
immediately dissolved. The government dispensed with a parliament for
more than a year and the king’s influence was supreme. The British High
Commissioner who succeeded Allenby, Lord Lloyd, judged this to be
undesirable. He used his influence and power, which were still great —
since the Declaration of 28 February 1922, while conceding Egyptian
independence, had reserved the defence of Egypt, the security of British
imperial communications, the protection of foreigners and the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan for continuing British control — to persuade the Egyptian
government to carry out elections. This was a defeat for Fuad and the
elections of May 1926 duly registered the fact by returning a Wafdist
majority. The logic of constitutional responsible government would have
therefore required Zaghlul to form an administration, but he was un-
acceptable to Lloyd and a non-Wafdist became Prime Minister. The
following year, Zaghlul having died, his successor Nahas made use of his
parliamentary majority to compel his own appointment as Prime Minister.
Shortly afterwards he fell foul of the British and, notwithstanding his large
majority, Fuad dismissed him, dissolved the parliament and appointed
as Prime Minister Muhammad Mahmud, the leader of the Liberal Consti-
tutionalist party. He suspended the Constitution and ruled for a year
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without a parliament. In 1929 a Labour government came to power in
Great Britain and wished to conclude an Anglo-Egyptian treaty. Such a
treaty could not, in its view, possibly be negotiated and concluded except
with a government which had the right to speak on behalf of the Egyptian
people, and only a government enjoying a parliamentary majority had
this right. Great Britain’s position in Egypt lent great weight to such a
view. Muhammad Mahmud’s position became untenable. The subsequent
elections ratified Muhammad Mahmud’s — and Fuad’s — setback by
returning a large Wafdist majority. The Wafd formed an administration
which failed to conclude a treaty with the British. The king dismissed it,
and appointed Ismail Sidqi, a non-Wafdist, as Prime Minister. He dis-
solved the parliament, promulgated a new constitution which gave greater
powers to the executive and held new elections. The electors returned a
very large anti-Wafdist majority. This parliament lasted from 1931 to 1936
when Egypt was in effect governed by Fuad through a series of king’s men.
In 1936 the British once again wished to conclude a treaty with Egypt;
once again they made it clear that they would negotiate only with an
Egyptian government which could claim to represent Egypt; and it was
again clear that they believed the Wafd to speak for the Egyptian people,
or at any rate for a large majority of it. It therefore became clear that the
royal policy had sustained a setback, which the electors duly ratified by
returning a very large Wafdist majority. Nahas formed a Wafdist admini-
stration which signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Fuad having
died the same year, he was succeeded by his son Faruq. He was a minor
and assumed his powers only on attaining his majority in July 1937. He
was as antagonistic to the Wafd as his father had been, and in December
dismissed Nahas and appointed in his place Muhammad Mahmud, who
dissolved the parliament elected in 1936. The Wafd thus sustained a defeat
which the electorate ratified by returning a large anti-Wafdist majority in
1938. This parliament lasted until 1942 when the British, fearing the king’s
pro-Axis sympathies, forced him by a coup d'etat to appoint Nahas Prime
Minister. He held new elections at which a large Wafdist majority was
returned. The second world war being nearly over in 1945, Faruq was able
to dismiss Nahas. His successor dissolved the 1942 parliament and a large
anti-Wafdist majority was returned. The 1945 parliament was the only
one to run its full course under the constitutional monarchy. The 1950
elections returned a Wafdist majority, an outcome which may have been
the result of an understanding between the king and the Wafd. The
military coup d'etat of July 1952 put an end both to monarchy and to
parliamentary government.
In Iraq, too, constitutionalism, introduced and established by the British,
proved — albeit for different reasons — a fiasco. Iraq was formed out of
three ex-Ottoman provinces — Mosul, Baghdad and Basra — which the
British conquered and occupied during the first world war. Conditions
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in these three provinces differed widely. The overwhelming majority in
the south was composed of a Shi'ite semi-settled agricultural population
accustomed to defer to its tribal leaders and to the mujtahids of Najaf and
Karbala; the north had a majority of Kurds; the west and north-west
contained a large agglomeration of Sunni Arab nomads. These and other
disparate elements the British government forced in 1921 into one central-
ised state controlled from Baghdad over which they placed, as king, Faisal,
the third son of the Sharif of Mecca. Power in this overwhelmingly Shi‘ite
and Kurdish state was exercised by politicians and bureaucrats drawn
from the Sunni Arab minority whose model and inspiration was the
centralised absolutism of the Ottoman Empire whose servants they had
hitherto been. To this centralising absolutism these men addedan ideology,
that of Arab nationalism, which they also wished to impose on this hetero-
geneous and apolitical population. To all these complexities and potential
conflicts, the British added the further complication of constitutionalism
and responsible parliamentary government. A Constitution setting up a
Parliament to which ministers were responsible was promulgated in 1925.
Iraq was then not an independent state but a mandated territory, and the
British High Commissioner had a supervisory, restraining and moderating
influence. But even during this period it was apparent that elections went
as the administration wanted them to go. After the mandate was termi-
nated in 1932 elections and parliaments were only counters in the political
game as it was played by the handful of politicians in Baghdad. Iraqi
politics had a very narrow base and hence were highly unstable. In the
period of the constitutional monarchy from 1921 to 1958 there was a total
of 58 cabinets. This narrowness and instability tempted politicians to gain
and hold power by extra-constitutional means. In 1934-6 they made use
of tribal dissidence in the imperfectly policed south in order to force
changes of government in Baghdad. These tribal rebellions were put down
by the Iraqi army. The military officers, seeing how indispensable they
were to the politicians, themselves started to intervene in politics in com-
bination with this or that faction of politicians. The period 1936-41 there-
fore saw a succession of military coups d'etat. The last one, in April 1941,
brought into power a pro- Axis government. This led the British to inter-
vene and, until 1945, Iraqi politics were under British supervision. After
1945, owing to the increase in centralisation the tribal uprisings of the
1 930s were no longer possible and by continuous purges and strict control
the army was prevented from interference in politics; but eventually such
measures proved useless and a military coup d'etat in July 1958 made a
bloody end of the constitutional monarchy. Between 1945 and 1958 the
same narrowly based political game went on being played in the capital
between a handful of politicians who manipulated elections and manoeuv-
red and intrigued each other out of office.
The constitutionalist movement in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran is a
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tribute to the prestige of the West in eastern lands; in Egypt and Iraq,
however, constitutionalism is rather the direct outcome of European politi-
cal pressure which was made possible by conquest and military predomi-
nance. The two decades following the second world war saw a progressive
and ultimately almost complete withdrawal of European control from the
Middle East. This withdrawal forms a stark and ironic contrast with the
decades immediately preceding when almost the whole of the Middle East
was under the control or influence of one or other of the European powers.
Significant European encroachment on Middle Eastern territories during
the ni n eteenth century may be said to begin with the French conquest of
Algeria, but the balance of power in Europe and the Mediterranean
operated generally to prevent annexations or occupation for many
decades. It was not until the early 1880s that France, following a bargain
struck at the Congress of Berlin, formally established a protectorate over
Algeria’s western neighbour, Tunisia.
Great Britain, too, having landed troops in Egypt in 1882 to deal with
the disorders consequent on ‘Urabi’s revolt, found herself exercising an
effective if informal protectorate over this autonomous Ottoman province.
Two other Middle Eastern territories came to be conquered and occupied
by European powers before the first world war. Italy had had ambitions
over Tunisia which the French protectorate disappointed. She therefore
considered herself entitled to ‘compensation’, the only available territory
to provide which was Tripoli, an Ottoman province. Having obtained the
consent or acquiescence of the other European powers, the Italian govern-
ment presented an ultimatum to Istanbul on 28 September 1911, alleging
the maltreatment of Italians living in Tripoli and declaring its intention
to land troops to protect them. The Ottoman government was given
twenty-four hours to consent ; but in spite of its conciliatory attitude the
Italian government, determined it would seem to prove Italian prowess,
declared war the following day. The Tripoli war dragged on for a year
before the Ottomans were compelled by the Treaty of Ouchy signed in
October 1912 to cede the province to Italy.
That same year by the Treaty of Fez France established a protectorate
over the greater part of Morocco. Ever since the conquest of Algeria,
Franco-Moroccan relations were inevitably strained. The frontier was
undelimited or imperfectly delimited and clashes were therefore to be
expected; French power was clearly superior and Morocco was a large
sprawling country with an extensive Berber-populated mountainous area
over which the sultan’s authority was sketchy and intermittent. As the
predominant power in North Africa France expected sooner or later to
take control of Morocco. What stood in her way was not Moroccan
military might but the objection and opposition of other European powers.
British policy, in particular, had been to insist on Moroccan independence,
but this policy was abandoned in 1904 in exchange for French acquiescence
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in the British occupation of Egypt. In the Anglo-French Agreement signed
in April of that year the British government declared that ‘it appertains to
France, more particularly as a Power whose dominions are coterminous
for a great distance with those of Morocco, to preserve order in that
country and to provide assistance for the purpose of all administrative,
economic, financial and military reforms which it may require’. The
Anglo-French Agreement was followed by a Franco-Spanish treaty in
September of the same year which allotted Spain a part of northern
Morocco opposite Gibraltar; Italy was conciliated by being conceded a
free hand in Tripoli. Germany, however, continued to oppose French
ambitions; but in 19 11 the French ceded a large tract of the Congo in
exchange for freedom of action in Morocco.
The protectorate established in 1912 was for France the prelude of a
long and costly process of pacification which went on intermittently until
the mid- 1 930s. Morocco’s condition in 1912 was pretty much as Sir Arthur
Nicolson described it in a letter written when he was British Minister at
Tangiers at the turn of the century.
The more I have seen of the members of the Government [he wrote] the more hope-
less seems any prospect of reform or progress. The main policy and occupation of
the Government is to set the tribes by the ears, to support one side, then wring
money out of the beaten one, and then later, extort money out of the victors for
assistance rendered. They wish to ruin the tribes, leaving them but the barest neces-
saries, so that they may be harmless. Their idea is that if a tribe becomes quiet and
orderly it becomes rich (relatively) and that they will purchase arms and munitions
and shake off subjection to the Government. No wonder that with this system the
country is going backward and commerce languishing, and that merchants find it
impossible to collect debts. It is rapacity, treachery, intrigue and misgovemment.
I have been in most Oriental countries, but I have never seen such complete darkness
as reigns here. The ignorance of the men I have met is simply incredible. It will all
jog on thus till some move is made from outside, but once the rickety edifice gets the
slightest push it will all come down.
But, far from coming down, the edifice was saved and immeasurably
strengthened by French military action and administrative reform. It was
a slow and very difficult operation, for the country was not pacified before
the mid-’thirties. By then, the central government of Morocco though still
under French control was potentially more powerful than any native
Moroccan government had been for centuries. The centralisation of
authority and the crushing of dissidence on which the French spent their
treasure and their blood in fact made it possible for a nationalist move-
ment after the second world war to organise a countrywide network of
opposition and dislodge the Protectorate in a remarkably short time.
What is true of Morocco is also true of Tunisia and of those Ottoman
provinces which Great Britain and France occupied at the destruction of
the Ottoman Empire during the first world war.
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The first world war and its aftermath saw European control extend —
albeit for a few decades only — over almost the whole Middle East. The
Ottoman involvement in this war on the side of the Central Powers
proved to have momentous consequences for this area, consequences
which even now have not yet been fully worked out. The war meant the
final and explicit abandonment of the traditional British policy of defend-
ing the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. This policy,
it is true, had ceased to command, in the two decades or so before the
outbreak of war, the wide assent it enjoyed until the Congress of Berlin
and after. There is no doubt that by 1914 the Ottoman connection had
come to mean very little to Great Britain. This becomes clear when we
consider how lukewarm was the effort to draw the Ottomans to the Allied
side, or at least ensure their neutrality. But, though the independence and
integrity of the Ottoman Empire was not by 1914 a vital and pressing
British interest, no circumstances had yet arisen to compel the formula-
tion of an alternative policy. The outbreak of war, however, now forced
an explicit reconsideration of attitudes and policies. The proclamation of
Egypt and Kuwait as British Protectorates was a first consequence of
Anglo-Ottoman hostilities. Others, more far-reaching, speedily followed.
The Gallipoli expedition embarked upon early in 1915 in order to destroy
Ottoman power by the occupation of Istanbul immediately elicited a
Russian demand for its possession in case of victory. The British and the
French conceded the Russian demand in February-March 1915. It had
been a cardinal principle of British policy to deny Istanbul and the Straits
to Russia, and this therefore was a veritable revolution bound to have
far-reaching consequences ; to involve, in fact, the partition of the Otto-
man Empire between Great Britain, France, and such other of their Allies
as could make good a case for obtaining a share of the Ottoman domains.
The British and the French agreed to a scheme of partition in discussions
which began in November 1915. The Russians joined this scheme after
securing some modifications in their favour. This partition scheme was
embodied in the Sykes-Picot Agreement — so called after the chief British
and French negotiators — which was signed in May 1916. In April of the
previous year, the secret Treaty of London had promised Italy, if she were
to join the Allies, an ‘ equitable share ’ in the partition of Asia Minor. This
promise was in due course made good in April 1917 when by the Agree-
ment of St Jean de Maurienne the British and the French promised the
Italians Smyrna, the vilayet of Aidin and a large sphere of influence to the
north. By mid-1917, then, Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy had
secretly arranged to divide the Ottoman Empire among themselves in the
event of victory. Great Britain was to acquire Mesopotamia up to the
north of Baghdad and an enclave on the Mediterranean in Haifa and its
surroundings. These two British territories would be linked, so to speak,
by a large area comprising southern Syria, the Syrian desert and Trans-
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jordan. France was to acquire Lebanon and Cilicia and exercise para-
mount influence in the Syrian hinterland and the vilayet of Mosul. Russia,
aside from Constantinople and the Straits, was also to acquire a large
area of eastern Anatolia. Palestine was to be internationally administered.
These secret arrangements were complicated enough, but they were
still more hopelessly tangled by other schemes and understandings. At the
beginning of the war, the sharif of Mecca was encouraged by the British
to plot a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Various vague and
grandiose inducements were held out to him : an independent kingdom of
the Hijaz, a transfer of the Caliphate from the Ottoman to his own
dynasty, and the formation of an Arab state. Negotiations between him
and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, went
on intermittently throughout 1915 and ended inconclusively in March
1916. The sharif made large claims and demanded an extensive Arab
state; what McMahon was prepared to concede was much less. His letter
to the sharif of 24 October 1915, which contained the British offer, whilst
couched in misleadingly generous terms, in effect promised little of sub-
stance. D. G. Hogarth’s summing-up of it still remains the most scrupu-
lously judicious yet written:
While it explicitly ruled out of negotiations all the Turkish-speaking districts which
Husain [the sharif] had claimed as Arab, and all Arab societies with whose chiefs we
already had treaties — while further, it reserved to French discretion any assurance
about the independence of the Syrian littoral, or the freedom from tutelage of the
interior, i.e. the districts of the four towns, Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo —
while by reserving other Arab regions in which France might have peculiar interests,
it left Mosul, and even, perhaps, Palestine, in doubt— while, finally, it stated
expressly that no guarantee for the unconditional delivery of either Lower or Upper
Iraq to the Arabs could be given by us ; — in spite of all these reservations it recognised
an Arab title to almost all the vast territories which Husain had claimed, including
Mesopotamia, subject only to limiting but not annulling conditions. 1
We may add, further, that this offer, couched in these misleading terms,
was in no sense a treaty with a recognised authority, but merely formed
part of an inconclusive correspondence with someone whose title to speak
or negotiate on behalf of the ‘Arabs’ was not self-evident. But in so far as
this letter offered anything unambiguously or without qualifications —
and it is difficult to see how it did so — what it offered, namely some kind
of Arab state in Syria and Mesopotamia, was provided for in the Sykes-
Picot Agreement; for in this agreement France and Great Britain pledged
themselves to ‘recognize and uphold’ an Arab state or confederation of
states to be set up in those areas of Syria and Mesopotamia which they
were not to annex, but in which they would respectively exercise para-
mount influence.
1 H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), History of the Peace Conference of Paris (1924), vol. vi, p. 126.
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The way in which McMahon phrased his offer to the sharif was to lead
to much trouble and contention later on, but that the offer fitted in with
the arrangements of the Powers cannot be doubted. Another undertaking,
the Balfour Declaration issued in November 1917, did not so fit in. It was
a unilateral British declaration issued to the Zionists recording that ‘ His
Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object’. This again was an ambiguous
document the interpretation of which later gave rise to many disputes.
But it was not only ambiguous, it was also in potential contradiction, not
so much with McMahon’s offer to the sharif, as with the Sykes-Picot
scheme. This scheme proposed an international status for Palestine, and
the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’,
most probably under British patronage, did not fit in well with such a scheme.
And it is a fact that the Sykes-Picot scheme was becoming highly un-
satisfactory in British eyes. The brunt of the fighting against the Ottoman
Empire was being borne by British troops. It was British troops who
fought in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915; British troops fought the Otto-
mans in Mesopotamia where they occupied Basra in November 1914 and
Baghdad in March 1917; British troops, again, confronted the Ottomans
in Sinai and were to be launched by Allenby in an offensive to capture
Jerusalem in December 1917 and Damascus in October 1918. Why then
should the French acquire such a dominant position in the Levant? There
is little doubt that this was a main consideration in the policy leading to
the Balfour Declaration. The Sykes-Picot scheme was also undermined
by the British encouragement of sharifian ambitions. A tribal force raised
by Faisal, third son of the sharif, had captured Aqaba in July 1917.
Faisal had then been taken up by Allenby, who made him the commander
of a so-called ‘ Northern Arab Army’ which, when it could and as it could,
served as an auxiliary to the British forces and operated east of the Jordan.
In October 1918, having finally routed the Ottomans, Allenby allowed the
sharifian troops to enter Damascus first and thus enabled Faisal to claim
its conquest. He was appointed as military governor of Syria under
Allenby’s authority and thus allowed to disregard and defy the French
in a territory where, according to the Sykes-Picot scheme, their influence
was to be paramount. With Russia out of the war since November 1917,
these developments meant that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was in ruins
and that Great Britain and France had to come to a new modus vivendi in
the Middle East.
The process was long-drawn-out, and may be said to have lasted from
the Armistice of Mudros between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied
Powers signed on 30 October 1918 to the Treaty of Lausanne concluded
on 24 July 1923 after lengthy negotiations between Turkey — as the heart-
land of the Ottoman Empire now came to be called — and Great Britain,
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France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania. The armistice found
British troops occupying Palestine, Syria, the Lebanon, Cilicia, and in
Mesopotamia the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad; immediately following
the armistice British troops also occupied the vilayet of Mosul. This state
of affairs tempted Lloyd George to try and persuade the French to give up
or modify their rights under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Immediately
after the armistice the French did give up in favour of the British their
claim to Palestine and to Mosul, but for the rest they were not to be per-
suaded. Deadlock ensued and lasted for a year. Finally Lloyd George gave
up and concluded an agreement with Clemenceau whereby British troops
would withdraw from Syria and the Lebanon and Cilicia, French troops
replacing them in the latter two territories, and Syria remaining under
Faisal’s control. The change-over took place in November 1919. Earlier
that year, in April, the Italians landed troops in Adalia to enforce their
rights under the Agreement of St Jean de Maurienne. This was followed
in May by the landing, under the protection of Allied warships, of a Greek
army in Smyrna. Smyrna and its district contained a large Greek element.
Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, who, during the war, had shown
himself to be pro-Entente, had presented in February 1919 to the Paris
Peace Conference a formal claim to the territory. The Allies, anxious also
to prevent an Italian occupation of Smyrna, were persuaded. The Greek
occupation — an occupation of a Muslim Turkish-speaking territory by
the troops of a formerly subject nation — aroused widespread resentment
and revived the will to fight in the country. These sentiments were canalised
and organised by Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), who not only led a success-
ful military resistance to the Greeks and the Allies, but also in the process
transformed the Ottoman sultanate into a Turkish republic, of which,
until his death, he was the unchallenged autocrat. In 1919, Mustafa
Kemal was an Ottoman general who during the war had distinguished
himself in Gallipoli and against the Russians in eastern Anatolia. He was
now in Istanbul, a city under Allied occupation where the sultan’s govern-
ment showed no will to resist the catastrophes that were falling upon the
country. In May he got himself appointed as Inspector-General of the
9th army based on Samsun on the Black Sea, and from there began
systematically organising resistance to the Greeks. At the end of 1919 he
established himself at Ankara, which gradually became the effective centre
of government, superseding in due course the Istanbul administration.
From April 1921, Mustafa Kemal’s troops began to get the better of the
Greeks. A decisive battle was fought at Sakarya on 24 August 1921, and
the Greeks were finally routed and Smyrna reoccupied on 9 September
1922. The revival of Turkish power led the Italians to think better of their
occupation of Adalia, and in June 1921 they agreed to remove their troops
from Asia Minor. After the battle of Sakarya the French, too, decided
to evacuate Cilicia, and ended their military involvement in Turkey by the
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Ankara Agreement of 20 October 1921. The British government then
remained the only power involved in Turkish affairs and hostile to Ankara.
After the occupation of Smyrna, Mustafa Kemal decided to evict the
Greeks from eastern Thrace, which they had also occupied. To do so he
had to cross the Dardanelles, which, after the Armistice of Mudros, was
under Allied occupation. The Allied contingents included British, French
and Italian troops; the two latter powers decided that they would not
stand in Ankara’s way, but Lloyd George was at first quite adamant that
the British troops should stop the Turks by force. It nearly came to war at
Chanak, but Lloyd George, finding himself isolated among the powers
and within the Empire, finally gave way and by the Armistice of Mudanya
agreed to the restoration of Istanbul and the Straits to Turkish sovereignty
(see above, p. 229). With the conclusion of the Treaty of Lausanne the
following year, no trace remained of any of the schemes for the Turkish-
speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire which the Allies had concerted
among themselves during the war.
This great and signal victory over the Greeks and their protectors
enabled Mustafa Kemal to do away with Ottoman rule and to establish
the regime at Ankara as the sole legitimate government of Turkey. The
Sultan Muhammad VI Wahid al-Din, who had come to the throne in
July 1918, had been very hostile to Mustafa Kemal and had acquiesced in
the measures the Allies had taken against his movement. In November
1922 the Grand National Assembly enacted that the sultanate was
abolished, but that the caliphate — now considered, in a manner com-
pletely untraditional, as a purely spiritual office — remained vested in the
Ottoman house. Muhammad VI Wahid al-Din, having taken refuge aboard
a British battleship, was considered as deposed and his cousin Abd al-
Majid proclaimed caliph. The abolition of the sultanate left the headship
of the state vacant. In January 1921 the Grand National Assembly had
passed a ‘ Law of Fundamental Organization ’ which began by laying down
that ‘sovereignty belongs without reservation or condition to the nation’.
Now, in October 1923, a year after the abolition of the sultanate, and in
application of the law of January 1921, the Grand National Assembly
proclaimed Turkey a republic, the president of which was elected by the
Grand National Assembly from among its members. A Republic set up
by the representatives of the sovereign people could, however, hardly
harbour a caliph however ‘spiritual’ his functions. On 3 March 1924
the Grand National Assembly resolved that the caliphate was abolished,
that the caliph was deposed and that all members of the Ottoman house
were banished from Turkish territory. This was the end of the most
ancient and venerable political office in Islam. This end was brought
about by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a direct heir of the Young Turks and of
their nineteenth-century westernising forebears. Mustafa Kemal, given his
opportunity by the war and its aftermath, impelled his fellow Turkish-
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speaking Muslims to cease looking on themselves as Ottomans, subjects of
the greatest Muslim state in the world, and to consider themselves instead
as the sovereign citizens of a republic and members of a Turkish ‘ nation’.
It was not only in Turkey that a great gulf opened between what the
victorious powers had proposed and what finally came to pass. In Syria,
in Palestine, in Mesopotamia too, the events overtook the tidy schemes of
the Allies. In the autumn of 1919 French troops replaced British in the
Lebanon, and Faisal, left in control of Syria, had to find and adopt some
line of policy towards his powerful neighbours. He had hitherto been
protected by the British, who made use of him in order to talk the French
out of their claims in the Levant. The attempt failed, and the British with-
drew, making it clear to Faisal that he had to reach some accommodation
with their rivals. But Faisal was a weak man unable to check his turbulent
followers, who forced on him a provocative and foolhardy policy towards
the French. The border between Syria and the Lebanon became tense and
insecure, and in March 1920 Faisal was proclaimed king of the United
Kingdom of Syria — i.e. Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine ! The French, in
no mood to condone sharifian defiance, issued an ultimatum in July which
required Faisal to accept French protection and control. Faisal, caught
between French threats and his clamorous followers, dithered; the ulti-
matum expired and the impatient French marched on Damascus. A brief
encounter at Khan Maisalun near Damascus on 24 July led to the rout of
the sharifian troops. The French occupied the city, put an end to the
sharifian regime and expelled Faisal from Syria. According to the Sykes-
Picot scheme the Lebanon was to be annexed by France while Syria was
to be under exclusively French influence. In the event, both Syria and the
Lebanon became French-administered mandated territories. ‘Mandates’
seem to have been invented by General Smuts towards the end of the war
and were included in the Covenant of the League of Nations which was
incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 23 June 1919. Article xxn
of the Covenant explained the notion of a ‘mandate’ and its mode of
operation :
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased
to be under the sovereignty of the states which formerly governed them and which
are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous
conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-
being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that
securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.
The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of
such people should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their re-
sources, their experience or their geographical position, can best undertake this
responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be
exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.
By their public pronouncements during and after the war the Allies had
made it very difficult for themselves to carry out the kind of scheme
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THE MIDDLE EAST
mooted in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. So, instead of annexations and
protectorates, France and Great Britain acquired ‘mandates’ in the
Middle East. The Allied Supreme Council meeting at San Remo in April
1920 had assigned to France the mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.
France in due course established local administrations in both territories
for the satisfactory performance of which she was responsible to the
League of Nations.
The San Remo meeting also assigned to Great Britain the mandates for
Mesopotamia and Palestine. According to the Sykes-Picot Agreement,
Mesopotamian territory up to the north of Baghdad was to be under
British control; but at the end of the war France ceded Mosul to the
British, so that, when the mandate for Mesopotamia was assigned to her.
Great Britain in fact controlled the three Mesopotamian vilayets. The
country was then being administered from Baghdad by a Civil Commis-
sioner assisted by Political Officers spread throughout the provinces. The
future of the country, its form of government, whether British occupation
would or would not continue : all these issues were highly uncertain, mainly
because the British government was unable to formulate a clear, unambigu-
ous policy. Further, the old Ottoman order had collapsed and had been
replaced by a European Christian government, the ways of which were
unfamiliar ; again, as has been said, the country, particularly in its southern
portions, presented a difficult problem of government. All these were so
many factors of disorder which, after San Remo, came to be exploited
by two groups: by the Shi’ite divines of Karbala, Najaf and Kazimayn,
whose influence among the tribes of the south was great, and by the Shari-
fians established across the border in Syria. Each of these two groups
wanted power for itself, but they united in the summer of 1920 in fomenting
a serious revolt against the British. By the autumn the revolt was put down,
but the British government, responding to a clamour for economy, decided
that the mandate for Mesopotamia need not entail direct British occupa-
tion and administration of the country. They resolved to make the
country a kingdom lightly policed by the Royal Air Force. In 1921 they
offered its throne to Faisal, whom the French had evicted from Syria. The
new kingdom was known as Iraq, an Arabic term adopted from the classical
period of Islam. This was an indication that, in the eyes of Faisal and his
followers, the new kingdom was meant to revive the Arab glories of the
early centuries of Islam. In the meantime, Iraq was a British mandate.
Article xxn of the League Covenant had specified that * Certain communi-
ties formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of
development where their existence as independent nations can be pro-
visionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and
assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone’.
In application of this, the mandatory instruments for Iraq, Syria and the
Lebanon, as approved by the League of Nations, required the Mandatories
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
to facilitate their ‘progressive development’ as independent states. Such
a provision of course meant that the Mandatory was always under
challenge to show that the mandated territory was not yet ready ‘to
stand alone’. Such a challenge constituted the staple of Anglo-Iraqi
politics in the decade following Faisal’s accession. The British were not
unwilling to be persuaded that Iraq should attain full independence,
and in 193 1-2, by a liberal distribution of promises of future good be-
haviour and a judicious exertion of pressure, Great Britain succeeded in
obtaining the entry of Iraq into the League of Nations as a fully indepen-
dent state. British policy in Iraq could not but influence the political
situation in the French-mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon. The
French themselves had had in 1925 a Druze rebellion to cope with in
southern Syria which, owing to the difficult terrain, they had much trouble
in quelling. Druze turbulence and maladroitness on the part of the French
had precipitated the rebellion; Arab nationalists in Damascus extended
the disturbances to Damascus and its environs and claimed that this was
not a mere tribal rebellion such as the Ottomans had often had to cope
with, but a national, Syrian, Arab revolt against French imperialism. It is
with the slogans of Arab nationalism, and with the claim that the Syrians
were ready and able ‘to stand alone’, that the French mandate was con-
tinuously challenged. The Popular Front government which came to
power in France in 1936 decided to emulate the British example and con-
cede independence to Syria and the Lebanon. Treaties were negotiated
and signed, but they were not ratified owing to objections by the French
parliament. The outbreak of war in 1939 was to affect profoundly the
French position in the Levant.
The Palestine mandate differed from the other Middle Eastern man-
dates in that the Mandatory was not required to facilitate the progressive
development of the country into an independent state. Instead, it made
the Mandatory ‘responsible for putting into effect’ the Balfour Declara-
tion which was incorporated in the preamble to the mandate. Zionist
colonisation in Palestine thus had now a legal foundation. This did not
mean — far from it — that it could proceed unhindered. The original in-
habitants of Palestine were, in their great majority, Arabic-speaking
Muslims, and they had always objected to Zionist settlement in the
country. They were not slow to voice these objections in protests and
riots the most serious of which in the first decade of the mandate were the
so-called Wailing Wall Riots of 1929. A case can be made for the view
that these riots and agitations were an attempt by the leaders of the
Palestine Arabs to intimidate the Mandatory into abandoning the Zionist
commitment, and that they would have died down as, on the one hand,
the British showed that they were not to be intimidated and as, on the
other, Jewish immigration proved unable to maintain its momentum.
Both assumptions were reasonably accurate before 1933, but the coming
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of Nazism in Germany falsified them almost immediately. Jewish immi-
grants from Germany and other European countries began coming in a
continuous stream. Great Britain also began to be threatened and hard-
pressed by the European dictatorships in Europe and the Mediterranean;
she was therefore much less ready to show firmness in the face of Arab
protests, particularly when these came to be supported by Arabs else-
where. A rebellion broke out in 1936 which led to the appointment of a
Royal Commission (headed by Lord Peel) to investigate the problem
anew. The Commission reported in 1937 that the Mandate as it stood was
unworkable and proposed to set up a small Jewish state in part of Palestine
while the rest of the country would be united with the Principality of
Transjordan which in 192 1 had been hived off from Palestine and was also
a mandated territory. The British government first accepted this recom-
mendation, but a year or so later declared it impracticable. It proceeded
to convene a Jewish-Arab conference in an attempt to reach a negotiated
settlement. This, the so-called Round Table Conference, met in London
in February-March 1939 but failed to come to agreement. The British
government thereupon issued a White Paper in May which drastically
limited Jewish immigration into Palestine and severely restricted the areas
of the country in which Jews were allowed to buy land.
It is clear that Great Britain embarked on this policy because she con-
sidered the cost of supporting the Zionists against the Arabs too high. By
1939 the Arabs were being increasingly wooed and encouraged by the
Axis powers, and, as they occupied lands of strategic importance, it was
considered that they had to be conciliated; hence the abandonment of
partition, to which the Arabs had objected, and hence, too, the White
Paper. But the Round Table Conference marked a significant departure
in British policy towards the Middle East. The Conference was not merely
between the Mandatory, the Palestinian Arabs and the Zionists — the
parties immediately concerned. To it the British government also invited
Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and Transjordan. This was to
admit and concede that these states, presumably by virtue of being ‘Arab’,
had the right to share in negotiations and decisions concerning Palestine.
The British government, therefore, was prepared to recognise an ‘Arab’
collectivity and deal with it as such. In other words, this was to accept the
claim of the Arab nationalists that there was one Arab nation which sooner
or later had to be unified in one state. We may presume that the British
government weighed and accepted these implications, and that the Round
Table Conference was — among other things — an attempt to wean the
Arab nationalist movement away from the Axis powers and to attract
them to the British connection. This policy was defined and accentuated
further when, in a speech of May 1941, Anthony Eden, the Foreign
Secretary, promised ‘full support to any [Arab unity] scheme that com-
mands general approval’. British support of Pan- Arabian and Arab
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nationalism was further demonstrated in the Lebanon and Syria during
the war. A year after French capitulation to Germany, in June 1941, Great
Britain mounted an expedition against the Vichy regime in the Levant and
quickly occupied the territory. A Free French contingent accompanied the
British troops and Free French authority replaced that of Vichy in the
mandated territories. At the start of the invasion, the Free French issued,
under British pressure, a declaration promising complete independence to
the Syrians and the Lebanese, which was endorsed and, so to speak,
guaranteed by the British. The Free French, anxious to establish them-
selves as the champions of French greatness, were subsequently reluctant
to implement this declaration to the full. In November 1943 they clashed
with the Lebanese government, which, obviously sure of British support,
had unilaterally ended the mandatory relation with France. The British
government, by pressures and threats, compelled the Free French to accept
the fait accompli. Again, a year almost after the liberation of France, the
French clashed with the Syrian government in May-June 1945, and again
the British government unequivocally sided with the Syrians. Their troops
entered Damascus and disarmed the French. Thus ended, for the time
being, the long rivalry that had opposed British and French in the Middle
East ever since the first world war. The British were now the dominant
power in the Middle East. In 1941, they had undone the recent Italian con-
quest of Ethiopia and, by 1943, Cyrenaica and Tripoli, conquered in 1912,
were Italian no more. The French were now eliminated. The Arab states
had, with British encouragement, conducted negotiations to achieve a
measure of unity which had gone, on from July 1943, and which had issued
in March 1945 in the formation of a League of Arab States. Of this League
Britain could justly consider herself the patron. But this appearance of
dominance was highly deceptive. Great Britain was to emerge from the
second world war gravely weakened and in no position to maintain an
imperial stance. And, in the Middle East itself, a pro-Arab policy was a
snare and a delusion. The fact is that there was not a single Arab state to
be friendly to and to patronise, but rather a number of rivals and near-
enemies each of whom claimed to be the only true promoter of Pan-
Arabism. To support one of these rivals was to alienate the other, and,
as speedily appeared after the war, British policy was wrecked on this
dilemma. Speaking in the French National Assembly in the aftermath of
the Syrian events of May-June 1945, the Foreign Minister, Bidault,
uttered a warning which turned out to be truly prophetic. Addressing the
British government he said: ‘ Hodie mihi, eras tibi '
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CHAPTER XI
INDIA AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
I. INDIA
At first sight it might seem that the obvious approach to Indian history
/A from 1905 to 1947 would be the study of the development and
^ triumph of the nationalist movement with its corollary of partition.
Yet a little thought must modify this view. Indian nationalism itself,
though much influenced by Western ideals and examples, had taken root
in Indian soil to produce much which was unique in itself. Further, the
Indian nationalist dialogue with the West had an economic aspect also ;
indeed, in the long run this proved to be one of its most potent in-
gredients. One cannot isolate political nationalism from economic issues,
or both from the structure of Indian society. And here we find a conflict
of ideas, values and behaviour patterns which suggest a movement in pro-
gress far deeper and more complex than political programmes or even
economic changes. In fact what the sanguine reformers of the reform era
had looked for in vain was beginning to materialise. Indian society had
gone beyond the acceptance of this or that from the West from motives of
duress or convenience; it was beginning to wish to integrate the new with
the old; it was beginning to question some of the basic presuppositions on
which it was itself based. A survey of the period must therefore be con-
cerned not only with political and economic issues only but also with
‘cultural’ ones; not only with the signposts of westernisation, but with the
evidence of assimilation and modification.
At the beginning of the century it might well have seemed to an observer
that the British Empire was at its zenith. The government had apparently
never been so strong or so vigorous; in the person of its representative
Lord Curzon it was undertaking its own overhaul. Confidence was general,
the sense of imperial mission strong and eloquently proclaimed. The move-
ment towards the West was gathering strength and the westernised class
steadily growing. The National Congress which expressed the political
aspirations of this class and had drifted into criticism appeared so weak
that Curzon could hope ‘to assist it to a painless demise’.
When Curzon retired five years later the situation had changed dramati-
cally. Public opinion was inflamed, conspirators were plotting and the
government itself was apprehensive and perplexed. While political circles
in Britain were absorbed with the Curzon-Kitchener controversy over the
disposal of a seat in the viceroy’s Executive Council, they missed the
significance of the Bengali protests, soon augmented from the rest of
India, at Curzon’s administrative partition of Bengal. It was the Olympian
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disregard of these protests, even more than the act itself, which inflamed
the sensitive Bengali nature. For the first time the Congress found itself
with general popular backing in one part of India. This change in a few
months was a portent; it alarmed some of the more staid Congressmen
themselves who preferred speeches to processions and resolutions to prose-
cutions. The protest did not end with the act of partition; it strengthened
the extremist wing of Congress with recruits who no longer believed in
British good faith and it created a small but active terrorist movement,
whose highlights were the murder of Curzon Wyllie in 1909, and the
wounding of Lord Hardinge on his state entry into Delhi in 1912. The
feelings of the articulate public were at the same time excited by the
Japanese victory over Russia in 1904-5; this proof that the West was not
infallible after all was reinforced by the revolutions in Turkey and Persia
which occurred soon afterwards.
This was the situation which faced Lord Minto in India and John
Morley as the new Secretary of State in London at the beginning of 1906.
A distinct rift had opened between government and people and it threatened
to grow wider. The next eight years record a determined effort by the
government to close this rift without conceding a major change of policy.
Morley and Minto agreed that Indians of the new classes should be
brought into closer consultation with the government and associated more
generously with the administration. Neither thought in terms of the parlia-
mentary democracy which was the political faith, coming down from
Gladstone and Ripon, of the Congress moderates. Minto’s durbar plan
was soon set aside, but then it was found that the government of India
was so far committed to Western political forms and the new classes to the
concept of parliamentary democracy that what was intended to be a con-
sultative autocracy analogous to the Prussian and Japanese systems be-
came in fact a preliminary step towards responsible government. With the
bludgeon of repression in one hand and the torch of political progress in
the other the government carried through the Morley-Minto reforms in
1 909. An enlarged Imperial Legislative Council still had an official majority
but the elective element was increased, supplementary questions could be
asked and resolutionsmoved. Indians were appointedfor the first time to the
Executive Council in Calcutta and the India Council in London.The Islington
Commission (1912) began to consider the admission of more Indians
into the public services. Apart from these ‘consultative’ steps a notable
innovation was made in the reservation of seats for Muslims in the councils
at the instance of the founders of the Muslim League in 1906. 1 The plea
was that poverty would exclude most Muslims from any property franchise
roll and thus from elective public bodies. The plea was true but the crack
in democratic principle thus created was to widen into the gulf of partition.
The reforms were followed by the revocation of the Bengal partition
1 Founded 30 December 1906; first session December 1907.
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and the removal of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, the one calculated
to please Bengalis, the other to please Indians as a whole. These measures
must on the whole be pronounced a success. The moderate leader Gokhale
was taken into something like partnership, and was able to win the support
of the middle class for his ‘moderate’ line of co-operation and persuasion.
Terrorism failed to spread and gradually died down; the extremist wing of
Congress, led by the Maratha, Tilak, was defeated at the Surat Congress
in 1907 and did not recover before the first world war; when Tilak was
imprisoned for six years in 1909 no one stirred in his support in western
India. Tilak’s attitude in contrast to Gokhale’s was the assertion of rights
instead of the plea for concessions, opposition to the government to the
limit of legality and the use of Hindu sentiment in stimulating anti-
government feeling. His words were brave but the new class was not yet
ready for these tactics. The Morley-Minto reforms are usually under-
estimated. But they should be viewed in the context of the confident im-
perialist autocracy which preceded them. Where obstacles are great even
modest progress may be vital. The reforms reached the logical limit of
‘consultation’, and with the political tide setting towards democracy the
next step must go beyond that limit.
During these nine years India was stirring in other directions. The
Tatas founded their Iron and Steel Company in 1907 and produced their
first steel in 1913. The poet Rabindranath Tagore carried Indian literature
to the world when his Gitanjali won him a Nobel Prize in 1912. There was
a perceptible stirring, and this process, apart from that of the atavistic
Arya Samaj, was generally in a Western direction.
The first impact of the war in 1914 confirmed this diagnosis. An out-
burst of loyalty brought from the princes offers of troops and service and
from the middle classes votes of money and aid in recruiting. The govern-
ment were able to send troops to France in late 1914, to Egypt for the
defence of the Suez canal, and later to East Africa and Iraq, where then-
bravery won admiration and the failure of supplies discredit for the mili-
tary authorities. India was denuded of British troops. No advantage, how-
ever, was taken of this enthusiasm, and as the war lengthened into years
it gradually turned into impatience and discontent. Most significant was
the change in the general Indian outlook. While the government marked
time politically and allowed its young civil officers to join the army,
Indian opinion rapidly stirred and matured. There was pride in the achieve-
ment of the Indian troops; Indians, it was clear, could fight as well as
Europeans. There was horror and disillusionment at the fratricidal strife
in Europe and the ferocity which both sides exhibited. Europeans be-
haved no better than Indians in the eighteenth-century wars. Thus the
notion of European moral superiority was exploded. Then came the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and President Wilson’s Fourteen Points
in 1918, with their recognition of self-determination. If the greatest
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autocracy could crash overnight, why should the Indian autocracy endure?
And, if European peoples could determine their future, why not India?
Indians considered themselves adult members of the world society; the
Gokhale attitude of requests for concessions gave place to the Tilak line of
demands and assertion of rights.
The British attitude to India had also changed, but not to the same ex-
tent. This explains why political reforms which were radical on any pre-
vious showing encountered major political opposition in the years after
the war. The Declaration of 1917 promised ‘the increasing association of
Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual develop-
ment of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisa-
tion of responsible government in India as an integral part of the empire’.
Theconstitutional Rubicon was crossed and led to the Government of India
Act of 1921 which embodied the ‘Montford reforms’. 1 By this measure
official majorities were swept away from the councils (which were much en-
larged), and some six million people were put on the registers to vote for
the various legislative bodies. There was devolution of powers from the
centre which prepared the way for later federalism. Indians were not given
responsibility in the central government, but in the provinces a ‘dyarchy’
was created : ministers responsible to the elected councils worked alongside
nominated official councillors as part of the provincial executive authority.
The practice of joint discussion between ministers and councillors was en-
couraged. The ministers were to be in charge of ‘nation building’ depart-
ments such as education, and some financial elbow-room was provided in a
division of the heads of revenue between the centre and the provinces. Along
with this went a new attitude on the part of the still autocratic government
of India under the leadership of the new viceroy, Lord Reading. The Row-
latt and Press Acts were repealed, 2 the unpopular cotton excise imposed in
Lancashire’s interest was first suspended and then abolished, factory and
social legislation was begun, and a beginning made with the Indianisation
of the officer cadre of the Indian army. The Lee Commission on the
services looked to an equal division of the Indian Civil Service between
Indians and British. Fiscal autonomy was granted and a tariff board
created to administer it. Externally India received international status as
a member of the League of Nations and was given a seat and a voice in
the (then) Imperial Conference. The distinguished liberal leader Srinivasa
Sastri headed government delegations and championed the cause of Indians
in the dominions.
All this argues a great change of outlook; the political and social face of
India in the ’twenties was in fact radically different to that of Lord Curzon’s
1 So called from its sponsors, Edwin S. Montagu, the Secretary of State for India
(1917-22), and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy (1916-21).
2 For the Rowlatt Acts see p. 301. The Press Acts of 1908 and 1910 made incitement to
violence in the press felonious and gave gpvemment power to suppress newspapers in certain
conditions.
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time. Yet the government could not avoid a major collision with national-
ism which left a rift not wholly closed till independence. The main reason
for this apparent contradiction is to be found in the transformation of the
Indian outlook already mentioned which caused officials returned from
war service to find they were speaking a different language to that of the
Indians, which they had formerly thought that they understood. The particu-
lar form which this clash took was due to the idiosyncrasies of one man,
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. At the end of the war in late 1918 Indian
opinion was restive and disturbed. It was irritated by food shortages, over-
zealous recruiting in the north, and governmental unresponsiveness; it
was stirred by the transformation of the world going on around it and
especially by President Wilson’s advocacy of the cause of subject peoples.
There was a feeling of restive impatience and great expectation in the air;
what before would have been welcomed as a boon was now liable to be
scorned as an insult. It was in this situation that, while the Montford
proposals were still under consideration, measures known as the Rowlatt
bills were proposed to strengthen the law against subversive activities. To
the tense minds and taut nerves of the time this seemed an outrage and a
mockery of the newly professed democratic principles of the Montford
Report. They were carried by the official majority against the votes of all
non-official Indians in the Imperial Legislative Council. Gandhi, then but
four years returned from South Africa, stepped forward to organise hartals
or stoppage of work on the grounds of conscience, in the big cities. He
had found a moral issue and he had found a way of appealing to a general
Hindu, as distinct from a particular caste, feeling. Riots occurred, and at
Amritsar on 13 April 1919 a crowd was broken up by troops without
warning; 379 killed and 1,200 wounded were officially acknowledged. This
and the severities of the aftermath created an emotional gulf between Brit-
ish and Indians. The Hunter Commission, reporting on the event early in
1920, divided on racial lines, and the House of Lords gave support to
the general in command, while others raised a large subscription for him.
Gandhi declared that there could be no co-operation with a satanic
government. Again he struck a responsive chord, focusing the venerated
Hindu concept of dharma or duty on a political issue. The moderates, led by
Srinivasa Sastri, and constitutionalists such as the veteran Tilak, were
swept aside and the Congress followed Gandhi’s lead for a non-co-opera-
tion campaign. At this moment his hand was strengthened by the support
of the Muslims, irritated and alarmed by threats to dismember Turkey,
the seat of the caliphate. The campaign lasted some eighteen months,
shaking the government as it had never been shaken since the Mutiny.
Nevertheless, the new constitution came into being and this, together with
alarm felt at outbreaks of violence and the Muslim Moplah rebellion in
Malabar, cooled enthusiasm until Gandhi himself was arrested early in
1922. Soon after, the abolition of the caliphate by the Turks took the
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ground from beneath the Muslims’ feet. By the end of 1922 the movement
was over.
But India was not the same. The government continued to work the new
constitution and many middle-class people, the backbone of the old
Congress, were content with this for the present. But Congress itself was
now under different and more determined leaders, with social roots
reaching far deeper than before. Congress was dominated by Gandhi, who
was henceforth the major architect of Indian independence. Gandhi had
made his name as the lawyer-champion of the Indian community in South
Africa, leading up to the Smuts-Gandhi agreement of 1913. It was there
that he developed his ideas, deriving partly from his home in Gujarat and
partly from Tolstoy and others : they included a belief in non-violence as
a moral creed, and a fierce disapproval of Western society as being
materialistic, based on greed, and subversive of morals. In India he
expanded these themes and added his own mystical concept of satya or
truth as the basis of all life and conduct. Gradually for him non-violence,
which began largely as a political tactic of the weak against the strong,
became a universal principle. To this creed he added an uncanny sense of
Indian psychology which enabled him to express his political campaigns
in terms which appealed to the general Hindu mind. To show his sym-
pathy with the Indian poor and disapproval of Western materialism he
adopted the peasants’ dress of dhoti and chadar\ the people in return
hailed him as a mahatma or great soul. 1 This aura of sanctity gave him
mass Hindu support which his political expertise enabled him to exploit.
Sophisticated congressmen acquiesced in spinning and sermons for the
sake of his political skill and national reputation; the masses accepted his
politics and the imprisonment which periodically followed because they
saw in him an embodiment of Hinduism and the guardian of Mother India.
Gandhi’s method was to gather round him a band of faithful disciples
called satyagrahis who spread non-violence as a faith for the few and as
a tactic for the many. He promoted hand spinning and weaving in
opposition to machine-made goods; he started a campaign for the ad-
mission of the large untouchable class into Hindu society. For him they
were Harijans or sons of God. Thus he attracted the idealism of the age to
himself and used it for his political ends. When Congress failed to follow
his line he retired, confident that it could not long do without him.
Gandhi turned Congress from a class to a mass movement; he nationalised
nationalism. He did this by linking political nationalism with Hindu
feeling. In some way it became a semi-religious concept. His reward was
independence; the penalty he paid was partition.
In the mid-’twenties Gandhi had to recover his lost leadership. In Eng-
land powerful conservative forces were not yet convinced that the Congress,
movement had any real roots in the country. During Gandhi’s imprison-
1 First awarded by Rabindranath Tagore but generally accorded from this time.
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ment Congress under C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru decided to contest
the next elections as the Swaraj party. The object was to bring the reforms
to a standstill by making popular ministries impossible. Their success was
only partial and they began to suffer erosion from politicians tempted by
the prospect of office and influence. While these political doldrums endured
the younger wing of Congress was growing visibly impatient with sterile
parliamentary opposition and even less rewarding spinning. It accepted
the Mahatma’s analysis of the government but called for action instead
of non-co-operation. It found in Jawarharlal Nehru and Subas Chandra
Bose two youthful and charismatic leaders. They made their first visible
impact on the Congress at its Madras meeting in 1928 when they carried a
resolution for full independence against the wishes of their elders.
At this moment of frustration the government provided an issue by
appointing the Indian Commission in 1927 under Sir John Simon’s chair-
manship to report on the working of the constitution as prescribed by the
1921 Act. The creation of the Commission earlier than was legally binding
was intended as a gesture of goodwill but the all-white membership of
it was interpreted as an insult. Opposition to the Commission provided a
rallying point for all the Congress groups. An all-party committee led by
Motilal Nehru devised a constitution as an Indian counterblast. By 1930
opinion had hardened sufficiently for Congress to demand a Round
Table conference within a year to draw up a dominion constitution,
under threat of civil disobedience. The government of Lord Irwin coun-
tered with its declaration in October that dominion status was the goal
of British constitutional development, and made the offer of a Round
Table conference to consider the next step. But Congress was adamant,
and on this narrow margin Gandhi launched his second anti-government
movement in April 1930. In making this decision Gandhi has been accused
of bad faith and bad judgement. The motive which seemed to have moved
him was not anti-government animus, for at first he recommended accept-
ance, but the state of the Congress. Left-wing sentiments were growing
among the younger men, sharpened by the economic depression and stimu-
lated by the spectacle of extremist movements in Europe, prescribing
drastic remedies for drastic situations. Gandhi feared a left-wing revolt
or even a breakaway, which would lead to a head-on collision with
government, severe repression for which Congress was not ready, and the
postponement of independence for a generation. So he decided to lead
a non-violent movement himself, only regretting that Lord Irwin had made
it so difficult for him to do so convincingly.
The struggle lasted nearly a year. The government was strained but did
not crack, largely owing to Lord Irwin’s resolution and balance. At one
time 60,000 satyagrahis were in prison, but the Round Table conference
met as planned, though without representatives of Congress. By 1931 it
was clear that Congress could not overthrow the government. The Gandhi-
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Irwin truce brought Gandhi to the second session of the conference, but
when he proved intransigent and restarted the movement it was crushed
quickly and severely. As in 1922 the public had had enough; the Congress
a second time had overplayed its hand.
But these two years of turmoil left their mark and provided an important
landmark on the road to independence and nationhood. At first Congress
seemed to have disappeared, but in 1934 it re-emerged as strong as before.
In fact the struggle demonstrated the strength as well as the weakness of
Congress. It could not take over the country but it could hold it up; it
could neither be broken nor suppressed for long. It was shown to be not
only a force, but the major force in the country to be reckoned with.
The realisation of this fact by the Indian government was important but
still more so was the parallel realisation in Britain. The bulk of the Con-
servative party (Labour was already converted), now entering on a long
spell of unchallenged government, realised that no settlement in India
was possible without Congress participation, that the national movement
was a reality which was growing in strength, that India could not for long
be held down against her will in current conditions and that independence
must therefore be planned for. If we must have an independent India we
will have a conservative independent India, was their view. These were
the assumptions upon which Conservative policy towards India in the
’thirties was based.
In India itself the movement saw a widening of the rift between the
Muslims and the nationalists. The Muslim masses held aloof, which in
itself caused resentment; the leaders were affronted by the refusal of the
Motilal Nehru Committee to include separate or communal electorates in
their proposed constitution. The intellectual Muslim nationalist M. A.
Jinnah broke finally with Congress on this issue. Extremism, which feeds
on action, grew in strength within Congress and began to display some
terrorist offshoots. But socially there was an enlargement of spirit. Mass
demonstrations and mass arrests drew and threw persons of all classes
together. Here was an issue above caste, and the struggle tended to break
down at least some of the external caste barriers. Particularly noticeable
was its effect upon the women’s movement. Hitherto the preserve of the
westernised few, the movement now drew large numbers of women,
attending demonstrations, addressing meetings, picketing liquor shops
and courting arrest. Gandhi blessed them and distinguished congress-
women like Mrs Sarojini Naidu encouraged them. The foundation of
their part in public life today was laid at this time. Even the fifty millions
of the depressed classes felt this wind of change, for the spirit of brother-
hood generated by the movement and Gandhi's prestige made many look
more kindly on his claims for them.
The next few years in Britain saw the implementation of the new Con-
servative outlook on India. Despite the determined opposition of the
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group led by Winston Churchill and Lord Lloyd which caused a perhaps
fatal two years’ delay, a new constitution was elaborated as the Govern-
ment of India Act of 1935. The Act was a blueprint for the constitution
of independent India, but a constitution on conservative lines. A federal
system replaced the unitary system of the past; this was designed to make
possible the incorporation of the princes in a single Indian state, and it
was balanced by the establishment of a Federal Court of Justice. There
was to be full responsible government in the provinces and dyarchy or
divided responsibility at the centre. The provincial electorates were en-
larged to thirty million voters, with legislatures and second chambers to
match. Clearly the next step could hardly be less than full dominion status.
It was hoped that the federal system with its semi-local autonomy for
Muslim-majority areas together with an elaboration of the system of com-
munal electorates and reserfed seats would calm the fears of the Muslims
and other minorities.
The conservative bias of the constitution was to be found not so much
in the reserved powers of the Governor-General or in the continued power
of parliament over India or in the property qualification for the franchise.
All these could be removed without affecting the main structure. The
parliamentary link was little more than an umbilical cord between political
mother and infant and arrangements were in fact made for the Indian
parliament to amend its own constitution in certain respects. The essence
of the conservative principle lay in the treatment of the princes and it
appeared in the guise of a revolutionary measure, the integration of the
princes with the new federation. In return for the surrender of certain
powers to the Centre they would retain internal autonomy in their states
and they would gain a large influence in all-India affairs. They would do
this by the nomination of one-third of the members of the lower and two-
fifths of those of the upper house of Parliament. Since the central ministry
would ultimately be responsible to the new parliament the political scales
would be heavily weighted in favour of conservative ministries. It was
the logical result of a long-standing princely policy of the government.
Congress rule might not be excluded but an extremist Congress regime
would be. Ironically, it was another conservative twist which undid these
plans. Adhesion to the federation was to be voluntary and was not to
come into force until half the states by population had acceded. Princely
second thoughts and hesitations were thus given a further opportunity,
and so gently was the policy administered that by the outbreak of the
second world war not a single state had acceded. Negotiations were then
suspended; by the war’s end the princes found that time and events had
passed them by.
These years in India saw two political developments. The first was the
revival of the Congress as soon as civil disobedience was called off in 1934.
But it was not the same Congress. Though chastened by the experience of
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running beyond the margin of mass support for the second time in twelve
years it was also strengthened in resolve and unity. This latter gift enabled
it to sweep the elections of 1937 under the new constitution, while the
caution produced by the former induced it to form provincial ministries
in six provinces out of eleven. They functioned with smoothness and
efficiency until they resigned after the outbreak of the second world war.
Within the Congress, however, a struggle was proceeding between its left
and its right wing. The younger generation and lower-income groups were
increasingly attracted to activist policies, looking to Jawarharlal Nehru
with his militant democratic socialism and Subas Bose with his revolu-
tionary idealism and dictatorial leanings. It was Gandhi’s achievement
during these years to keep the Congress united, allowing it neither to
founder on the revolutionary rock nor to retire into elderly quietism. His
method was to smother the radicals with promotion and then to control
them by personal magnetism and the veteran vote in the Working Com-
mittee. He found Jawarharlal Nehru more amenable to this process than
Subas Bose, and indeed established a personal ascendancy over Nehru
which lasted until the eve of independence. He postponed a clash as long
as possible, but when in 1939 Bose wanted a second turn as Congress
president after the two terms enjoyed by Nehru, he drove him from office.
This was a parting of the ways, for Nehru to the first premiership of India,
for Bose to the leadership of the National Army in Burma. An offshoot
of this activist sentiment was the rise of the Communist party during the
’thirties. It alarmed the government but it was too foreign and too secular
seriously to challenge the Congress.
The second political development in the ’thirties was the rise of the
Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the emergence of the
concept of Pakistan. The Muslim community in India, one-fourth of the
whole population, was already in eclipse when it was made the scapegoat
of the Mutiny by the British. From this depressed condition it was
rescued by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1815-98), who sturdily preached
self-help, induced Muslims to accept Western education to put them into
competition with the Hindus for the public services and to accept British
rule as preferable to Hindu. His aim was a modernised Muslim community
forming an essential component of a British Indian state. As soon, there-
fore, as the new National Congress began to think in terms of ultimate
self-government he took alarm. Majority rule, he said, could only mean
Hindu rule. He stood aloof from the Congress and carried most Muslims
with him. Henceforward each move towards self-government provoked
a Muslim demand for safeguards. The Muslim League was formed in 1906
as soon as reforms looked possible in the post-Curzon period. It demanded
safeguards which were embodied in the Act of 1909 and extended with
each instalment of reform. After the first world war there was a brief
honeymoon with Gandhi’s Congress when the Muslim supporters of the
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caliphate joined in the non-co-operation movement. But after the aboli-
tion of the caliphate in 1924 the previous process of mounting suspicion
was resumed. Fear grew as the prospect of eventual independence became
clearer and was fanned by uncompromising statements from extreme
Hindu groups which the Congress was unable to control. As the 1935
reforms came into view the policy of withdrawal came into discussion.
It was first put forward by Sir Muhammad Iqbal in 1930 and given the
name Pakistan by Choudhri Rahmat Ali in 1933.
It was in this situation that Jinnah turned what had hitherto been a
middle-class movement of disputed leadership against a background of
mass quiescence into a dynamic mass movement. For long Jinnah had
hoped for the integration of political Islam into the national movement.
He was disillusioned by the terms of the Motilal Nehru report or proposed
constitution in 1928 and exasperated by the attempt of the Congress to
break up the League altogether in the United Provinces after winning the
provincial elections there in 1937. Then Jinnah, a westernised lawyer-
politician from Bombay who could not speak Urdu, appealed to the
masses. He was helped by the smouldering Muslim distrust of Hindus and
by the communal pinpricks administered by the minor officials of Con-
gress ministries which he knew well how to exploit. When these ministries
resigned in late 1939 he organised a successful thanksgiving day and the
next year he adopted an independent Pakistan as the aim of League policy.
There were two nations in India, he said, and they must each follow their
own destiny.
The decade of the ’thirties saw the steady advance of the new India
towards adult nationhood. In the economic sphere colonialism was giving
place to a planned economy whose slogan was fiscal autonomy and symbol
the Tariff Board. Created in 1923, the Board successfully protected the
young steel industry from the effects of the depression of the early ’thirties
and saved the cotton industry from the threat of cheap Japanese textiles.
New industries like cement were founded and old ones like sugar-refining
extended to make India independent of foreign supplies. By the second
world war India was a country with modem industries if not an industrial-
ised country ; she ranked sixth in the list of the world’s steel producers.
In education there was rapid expansion with the introduction of the
teaching university on the British civic model and experiments in a federal
collegiate system. Technical education began to develop. Primary educa-
tion increased more in concept that in fact with Gandhi’s basic education
scheme and the Sargent plan for universal elementary education by
1970. 1 Nevertheless it went forward, especially in the Punjab. Women’s
higher education developed rapidly though female literacy was only
half that of the men. Intellectual life acquired a new vigour. Formerly
Tagore had been something of a lone star but now there appeared such
1 Sir J. Sargent was Educational Adviser to the Government of India, 1938-46.
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distinguished figures as Sir S. Radhakrishnan and Dr S. C. Das Gupta in
philosophy. Sir J. C. Bose and Sir C. V. Raman in science, and Sir J. Sarkar
the historian. In literature a whole school of young writers, practising in
both English and the Indian languages, of whom Mulk Raj Anand and
R. K. Narayan may be mentioned, studied current social and cultural
problems with the help of western literary techniques. Indian music experi-
enced a revival and Indian painters, inspired by Ajanta models, produced
a distinctive school whose leader Abanindranath Tagore won an inter-
national reputation.
All these developments except the last two mentioned were Western in
character, and even modem Indian music has been influenced by the West.
The signs were that the West was gaining over Indian tradition in the
intellectual and artistic fields. There were distinguished exceptions of
whom may be mentioned Sri Arabindo of Pondicherry, the expounder of
neo-Vedantism in mellifluous English, and Sir Muhammad Iqbal, philo-
sopher and poet in Persian and Urdu, whose ideas provided an intellectual
dynamic for the Pakistan movement. For the rest, traditionalist move-
ments like the Arya Samaj made little progress. Gandhi’s advocacy of a
village economy and mstic philosophy was visibly faltering. His cap
became a badge and khaddar a party uniform. On the other hand hi
Harijan and temple entry campaigns were openly hostile to Hindu ortho-
doxy. It could not therefore be said that there was yet any marriage of
Eastern and Western concepts or any prospect of early intellectual or racial
integration. But there were no longer defensive apologetics on the one side
facing critical superiority on the other. There was an interchange of ideas,
a running dialogue on a basis of adult equality.
In the summer of 1939 a casual observer in India might have considered
the position not unhopeful. Congress ministries had worked in eight
provinces for over two years while governments backed by both Hindus
and Muslims firmly held Bengal and the Punjab. The Muslim League was
loud in its protests but it had made little progress in the vital Punjab, and
there was little evidence to show how far its roots had spread into the soil
of popular Islam. The princes still hesitated to enter the federation but
agents moved to and fro between their courts and it seemed that the Vice-
roy was determined to achieve success. Then came the outbreak of the
second world war. It found India far less prepared for it than for the first
world war. On that occasion there was an identification by India of herself
with Britain; the British cause was the Indian cause; there was an out-
burst of princely loyalty and middle-class enthusiasm. But since then the
British government had become ‘ satanic ’ in the eyes of many ; the Congress
was now the keeper of India’s conscience. The Indian public had become
adult in their attitude; their view of the crisis was detached and aloof;
they were not unsympathetic to the Allied cause but were highly critical
of British policy: they remembered the constitutional maxim which they
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had learnt at college: ‘no supply without redress of grievances’. The war
made little impact until the fall of France shocked the public into concern
and anxiety. The British stand and the battle of Britain were viewed with
growing admiration but little inclination to give unconditional aid ; there-
after the mood of detachment returned until the Japanese action brought
the war to the Indian doorstep in early 1942.
Neither of the two great parties officially supported the war or would
allow their members to sit on the War Council which met in Delhi. But
this did not prevent individuals from acting on their own. The war had a
profound effect on Indian life and development. There was first the war
effort. Indian troops took part in the desert campaigns of North Africa,
where their 4th and 7th divisions won international fame, in Abyssinia
and the Middle East. Later they were involved in the disastrous Malayan
campaign leading to the fall of Singapore. Ninety thousand became
Japanese prisoners, from some of whom Subas Bose recruited his
National Army. After the fall of Burma they were concerned with the
defence of the Indian border, winning laurels with the heroic defence of
Kohima in 1944, and crowning their achievement with the recapture of
Rangoon in early 1945. The record was impressive, but it moved the public
to nothing like the extent of their forebears in the first world war. This
again was evidence of the new Indian maturity in public matters. They
were no longer surprised and gratified by Indian military achievement;
they expected it and took it for granted.
But behind the front the social and economic consequences of the war
were indeed great. The army was expanded from its peace-time strength
of 175,000 to more than two millions. The men were drawn from the
villages and they were much more evenly spread over the country than in
the first world war. Many received the technical training demanded by
mechanised warfare. Both the social impact on village life and the tech-
nical stimulus were proportionately great. This expansion helped to lay
the foundation for the social and technical developments of post-war
India. After the armed forces came the expansion of supplies. At first the
army authorities were apathetic on the ground that an unmechanised
Indian army could play no part in a mechanised war. But after the fall of
France the attitude changed. India became a supply centre for the Middle
East. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, at his best in administration, organised
the Eastern Group Supply Council. India came to supply 75 per cent of
the total demands of this theatre. With the entry of Japan and America
the pattern of supply changed, but industrial development went on faster
than before. Tata’s great steel works were extended and supplemented at
Bumpur and elsewhere. The cement industry was greatly expanded to
service the new airfields of eastern India, a new aluminium industry
exploited the ample supplies of bauxite, and the mica industry was en-
larged. These developments were far greater than those during the first
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world war, and again laid a foundation for the policy of large-scale
industrialisation of the post-war Indian government. The last shreds of
colonialism were blown away in the effort to stop the Japanese.
A further effect of the war was the reappearance of famine in Bengal
in 1943. Since the drawing up of the Famine Code in 1883 there had been
no famine of hunger because imported food had sustained and relief work
had occupied the cropless villagers. But when the Japanese occupation of
Burma in 1942 cut off its rice there was no alternative external food supply
on which to draw. The overall deficiency was not reckoned to be more
than five per cent and the problem was one of distribution. But the
railways were already strained by the east-west flow of military supplies
from Bombay to Assam. To this was added a new north-south traffic in
foodstuffs. The local governments proved quite unable to meet the situa-
tion or distribute fairly the supplies which came from the Punjab. The
Viceroy, with ill-timed scruples about federal rights, remained aloof. The
famine mounted amidst wringing of hands and profit taking until the new
viceroy, Lord Wavell, visited Calcutta, put the British army on to distri-
bution, and introduced rationing into all the chief cities as a measure of
fairness. The subsequent enquiry commission estimated direct and con-
sequential deaths at between one and a half and two millions. This famine
was something of a portent for it seemed to show that the British were
losing, not so much their capacity for administration as their vigour in
taking decisions in a crisis.
The politics of the war began with the resignation of the Congress pro-
vincial ministries in protest at India’s involvement in war without her
consent. This is considered by many to have been the first tactical mistake
of Congress because it removed its very real control from the administra-
tive machine and inclined the government towards the less intractable
Muslim League. A political deadlock then ensued, with interludes of
negotiation until the end of the war. For the Congress there could be no
participation in the war without self-government, for the government no
constitutional settlement until after the war. The slogan ‘after the war’
hung heavily round the government’s neck as did that of non-co-operation
upon the Congress. Between the two the opportunity of understanding
through joint action was lost. The discontents of a prolonged war, intensi-
fied with Japan’s entry in late 1941, played into the hands of Congress;
on the other hand the number of troops poured into the country from that
time made any serious subversive effort hopeless. Meanwhile the way was
cleared for the Muslim League. In 1940 it adopted Pakistan as its political
goal and continued its propaganda unchecked. It won nearly every Muslim
by-election and by the end of the war had a block of 25 seats out of an
elected membership of 104 in the Central Assembly.
The Viceroy responded to the Congress tactics by offering an enlarge-
ment of his Executive Council, which he effected in August 1940, and a
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constituent assembly after the war. Gandhi, on the other hand, resorted
once more to civil disobedience but arranged the campaign with such
solicitude that the government was not seriously embarrassed. About
14,000 persons were in prison in early 1941, led by Gandhi’s chief disciple
Vinoba Bhave. So matters rested until the Japanese entry into the war
created a new situation. The war was now on India’s doorstep and her
co-operation in defence was vital. It was time for a major effort and it was
made in the form of a new constitutional offer conveyed by Sir Stafford
Cripps, then freshly returned with his Moscow laurels, in March and
April 1942. The offer was radical but the circumstances made it plausible
to attribute it as much to Britain’s dire need of support in a crisis as to
generosity or foresight. A constituent assembly was to be called im-
mediately after the war to draw up a constitution for an Indian Union
with dominion status. The new state, like other dominions, would have
the right of secession. The Indian states could join but the scheme would
proceed without them if necessary. Minority rights were recognised by
allowing a province to contract out of the new arrangement. The future
seemed provided for but there remained the present, and it was on this
rock that the offer foundered. Congress leaders were at first favourable
but under Gandhi’s influence they insisted on the full powers of a dominion
cabinet for the proposed executive council of national leaders. Gandhi
was reported to take a pessimistic view of British prospects; should the
Congress draw a cheque on a failing bank? A little waiting, some increase
in British extremity, and the whole government might fall to them.
The high hope of the offer produced a corresponding reaction. Gandhi
anticipated in August the expected crisis of Japanese action in October by
threatening mass civil disobedience because of the failure of the British to
‘Quit India’. ‘After all’, he said, ‘this is open rebellion.’ The government
interned the whole Congress committee and firmly repressed an attempted
rising by the left wing at the cost of 900 lives and a million pounds of
damage. Henceforth it was unchallenged. Congress, in missing this oppor-
tunity of controlling the government before the Muslim League was strong
enough to interfere, lost its last opportunity of preserving a united as well
as achieving an independent India.
With the end of the war in Europe a new situation arose. Dominion
status must now come in some form or other. But it was thought that the
war in Asia would last another year and that during that time the govern-
ment could negotiate with the Indian parties from strength. Lord Wavell
called a conference in June to form an interim cabinet on Crippsian lines
but this broke down on the League’s claim to represent all Muslims. The
surrender of Japan in August 1945 set the stage for the final scene. Over-
night the weightage of political factors was transformed. The British
could no longer dictate or block the dictation of others. Their military
strength drained away with rapid repatriation, and their governing
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purpose was undermined by a radical change of sentiment in Britain and
in the world. The new Labour government was pledged to Indian self-
government and was only concerned with ways of achieving it. Hence-
forth the British in India could argue and conciliate but not direct. With
Indian sentiment in its then condition partition was inevitable. In the
winter of 1945-6 a general election showed that the Muslim League
dominated Muslim India as much as the Congress did Hindu India. The
confrontation of the two parties was now clear and the leader of the smaller
was a master tactician. At the same time a short-lived naval mutiny showed
how narrow was the margin of authority still left to the British. From
March to June a Cabinet Mission consisting of Lord Pethick-Lawrence,
Sir S. Cripps and A. V. (later Viscount) Alexander made a major attempt
to find an agreed settlement. 1 This broke down, nominally on the allot-
ment of communal seats but really because neither side was willing to give
up its respective goals of union and partition. Recriminations led to
Jinnah’s ‘direct action day’ of 16 August. The bloody riots which then
afflicted Calcutta started a chain reaction in north India leading to endemic
civil war in the Punjab from early 1947. In this mounting confusion and
creeping anarchy the leaders on all sides were helpless; every move by one
side was sabotaged by the other.
The London government met this situation by announcing in February
1947 the dispatch of Lord Mountbatten to wind up British rule not later
than August 1948. After a final attempt at conciliation he worked out a
plan for partition to which the parties agreed in June. He pushed forward
with such speed that the actual handover was achieved on 14 August 1947.
To Pakistan was allotted the West Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, the Frontier
Province and the Muslim majority areas of East Bengal and Assam, to
the new India the remainder. A boundary commission settled frontier
details. The Indian princes were released from their allegiance to the crown
and urged to join one or other of the two states.
In this way the British-Indian controversy dissolved and was soon
found to have left little but goodwill behind it. But it left in clearer
relief the Hindu-Muslim controversy, which was not so much resolved as
transmuted. The murder of an estimated half a million people on both
sides and the migration of over ten millions at the time of partition in 1947
was the price for this transmutation of unresolved tension. On the other
hand separation enabled each state to establish a strong government
which could carry through modernisation programmes. For these the
Indians, and to a much lesser extent the Pakistanis, found the foundation
already laid by the British activities of the preceding quarter of a century.
1 The Mission was in India from 24 March to 29 June 1946.
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2. SOUTH-EAST ASIA
At the beginning of the twentieth century control over the vast area of
mainland and islands now known as South-East Asia was almost mono-
polised by the Netherlands, Britain, France and the United States of
America. Of the four the Dutch had been established the longest and
possessed by far the richest empire. With its centre at Batavia, founded
by Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1619, Netherlands India, the ‘ girdle of emerald
flung round the equator’, comprised the whole Malay archipelago except
the Philippines, newly acquired from Spain by the United States (Treaty
of Paris, December 1898), north-western Borneo, the Portuguese half of
Timor, and eastern New Guinea, the northern part of which was in
German possession, the southern a British colony. The Netherlands
Indies stretched for nearly three thousand miles from the north-west
point of Sumatra to the eastern limit of Dutch territory in New Guinea,
its breadth from north to south was roughly thirteen hundred miles,
and it had a total land area of nearly 735,000 square miles. In 1900
the reduction of the whole area to Dutch rule was still incomplete.
Much of it had been acquired only in the second half of the nineteenth
century. The Achinese of north-west Sumatra, who had been fighting for
independence since 1873, were not to be finally brought under control
until 1908.
The British empire in South-East Asia was mainly continental. Its
largest territory was the former ‘Kingdom of Ava’ (Burma), which had
been annexed piecemeal to British India between 1824 and 1886. To the
south of it lay the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca,
a crown colony, and the four Federated Malay States of Perak, Selangor,
Negri Sembilan and Pahang, nominally independent sultanates under
British protection. In 1909 Siam was to transfer to Britain her suzerain
rights over the Malay states of Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Trengganu.
In 1912 Johore was to come under British protection. In Borneo Sarawak,
ruled by a nephew of the original Raja James Brooke, British North
Borneo, administered by the chartered company of that name, and the
sultanate of Brunei, were also British protectorates.
On the Mekong River and along the shores of the South China Sea
France had been busy, from 1859 onwards, carving out for herself an
extensive Indo-Chinese empire. It comprised the colony of Cochin-China
in the extreme south, together with the protectorates of Annam and
Tongking, Cambodia and Laos. Over the last named her control was
still incomplete in 1900. The United States was the last western power
to acquire any considerable territorial dominions in South-East Asia.
After the Spanish-American war of 1 898 Spain had been forced to cede the
entire Philippine archipelago. Not until 1901 , however, was American con-
trol finally established after intensive guerrilla warfare against a vigorous
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Filipino independence movement, which the Americans themselves had
previously nourished and armed against Spain.
The kingdom of Siam was the sole remaining independent state in the
whole area. For years it had maintained an uneasy, precarious existence
between the expanding empires of Britain and France. King Thibaw’s
attempts to play off France, then conquering Tongking, against Britain
had led to the extinction of the Burmese monarchy and the annexation
of Upper Burma. Siam’s hour of crisis arrived when France used her
new position in Vietnam to snatch the Laos kingdom of Luang Prabang
from Siamese suzerainty and push the Siamese out of all their territories
east of the Mekong. British administrators in South-East Asia were con-
vinced that the French regarded their empire in Indo-China as a base
for further advances, into China on the one hand and the Menam valley
on the other, and even into the Malay Peninsula. The ‘Paknam incident’
of July 1893 was undoubtedly staged in the hope that Siam would lose
her head and present France with a plausible pretext for another forward
move. Actually it brought Britain and France to the brink of war, for
British policy was to maintain an independent Siam as a buffer state
between the Indian empire and French Indo-China. Prince Devawongse’s
admirable handling of the situation and British diplomatic pressure on
France preserved Siam’s independence for the time being. Then in 1896,
after Anglo-French relations had again been strained almost to breaking-
point over a quarrel between their respective boundary commissioners
on the Upper Mekong, the two powers agreed to a joint guarantee of the
independence of the Menam valley. But not until the Entente Cordiale
of 1904 was Siam safely out of the wood.
In 1900 a new age of colonial exploitation had begun which was linking
the East more closely than ever before to the productive system of the
West. With the arrival of the internal combustion engine the tin, rubber
and oil of South-East Asia became vital to Western economy. Private
capital, directed by a few powerful corporations, was insisting upon the
more efficient exploitation of colonies. Efficiency, in fact, was becoming
the new administrative watchword, with Lord Curzon in India as its major
prophet. But to the new generation of colonial administrators that was
arising it was efficiency not merely for the sake of the profits of ‘big
business’, but equally for the welfare of subject peoples. Kipling’s ‘white
man’s burden’ had its Dutch counterpart in the ‘ethical policy’ of Van
Deventer, whose article ‘Een Eereschuld’ (A debt of honour) in De Gids
(1899) marks the beginning of the great change in the Dutch attitude
towards their colonial peoples. Prosperity, however, was the prerequisite
of social progress. The potentially rich but undeveloped countries of
South-East Asia were too poor to support the heavy cost of improved
social services. Hence in making them a happy hunting ground for private
capital, colonial governments provided themselves with means for under-
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taking large-scale public works and promoting higher standards of public
health and welfare.
Thus the economies of the South-East Asian peoples became dependent
upon external markets and, in the cases of French Indo-China and the
Philippines especially, closely linked with the economies of their metro-
politan countries. The self-sufficiency of the indigenous village broke down
with the rapid expansion in the production of cash crops and the change-
over to a money economy; while the import of cheap manufactured
articles from Europe and America had a depressing effect upon many of
the local handicrafts, which had provided the peasant cultivator with a
valuable supplementary source of livelihood. At the same time an un-
paralleled increase in population, the result of better administration and
of Western public health measures, caused social disintegration in many
areas. In Burma there was a big movement of population into the Irra-
waddy Delta region, especially after 1870, to expand its rice production,
with British encouragement, so that by the end of the century Burma had
become the world’s largest producer of rice for export. The phenomenal
increase in Java’s population outran all the Dutch efforts to increase food
production, and caused such intense pressure upon the land that the size
of individual holdings, already too small with an average of 2\ acres per
family at the beginning of the twentieth century, tended still further to
diminish, with serious effects upon the peasant’s standard of living. But,
bad as this situation was, it was better than that prevailing in the con-
gested areas of the Red River valley of Tongking, where the depression
caused by fragmentation of holdings was rendered worse through the
acquisition by speculators of the communal lands which for centuries had
been the village community’s safeguard against poverty. In the Philippines
the same tendency had begun to show itself by the end of the Spanish
period in central Luzon and Cebu, where population pressure was aggra-
vated by tenancy problems which the Americans, with their free-enterprise
ideas, made no attempt to solve. 1
Thus twentieth-century colonial rule failed to maintain adequate stan-
dards of living for the peasant classes forming the overwhelming majority
of the population of South-East Asia. The world slump, the full effects of
which began to be felt in 1930, knocked the bottom out of the world
market in South-East Asia’s staple products. It revealed for the first time
in its true proportions the problem of agricultural indebtedness, and
brought home to the educated elites among South-East Asians the alarm-
ing extent of the dependence of their economies upon those of the West.
Peasant distress found expression in serious uprisings in Burma and Viet-
nam, and in armed clashes between peasant organisations and landlords’
private armies in the Philippines. In Indonesia Dutch control was too firm
1 C. A. Fisher, in South-East Asia, a Social, Economic and Political Geography (London,
1964), PP- *61-94, surveys the main economic effects of Western domination.
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and alert, having already been unsuccessfully challenged by left-wing revo-
lutionary movements which came to a head in late 1926 and early 1927.
A new and more intense nationalism was everywhere generated in
response to Western rule. In its development Western education played
a predominant role. The welfare state needed an increasing supply of
trained indigenes in its expanding administrative services, as also did
industry and commerce. The consequent development of secondary and
higher education, based on Western methods and using Western languages
as media of instruction, created a new intelligentsia which had been intro-
duced to Western thought and organisation. Western history and science.
They felt the influence of the scientific revolution that was transforming
the outlook and techniques of the West. They were offered a new con-
sciousness of their own historic past through the rescue, by Western
archaeologists and scholars, of their ancient monuments and artistic
treasures from ruin and oblivion, and the scientific study of their historical
records. The impact of all this brought them a new self-awareness, and
stimulated a renaissance bearing many resemblances to the European
renaissance at the end of the Middle Ages. They deeply resented their
relegation to a place of inferiority by westerners. They considered their
culture to be as good as that of the West save in technology. Moreover,
Western education was imparted with a Western-centred outlook which
ignored indigenous modes of life and thought. Hence, by reaction, there
was a revival of traditionalism which expressed itself in the identification
of Buddhism in the Buddhist countries, and of Islam in the Islamic ones,
with patriotism, in the re-assertion of traditional mythology, and in
demands for greater recognition of national languages and literatures. 1
National hatred was also whipped up against the foreign Asians whom
Western economic exploitation of South-East Asia had attracted as immi-
grants, especially the Chinese and Indians. Their interest in, and support
for, the intense nationalism, which developed in their own respective
countries simultaneously with the South-East Asian national movements,
militated strongly against their assimilation with the peoples among whom
they lived, and made them a butt for their xenophobia.
Finally there was the influence of external events. The anti-Western
Boxer rebellion in China in 1899, the rise of Japan as the self-styled
champion of Asian rights and her victory over Russia in 1905, the Chinese
revolution and the consequent deposition of the Manchu dynasty in 1912,
and Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian swaraj movement, all conveyed to
the South-East intelligentsias a feeling of Asia arising and challenging
Western domination. It was from their ranks that the leaders of the
nationalist movements sprang. For them the doctrine of self-determina-
1 On this point see Donald E. Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton, 1965),
pp. 52-7, 75-6 and 1 18; W. F. Wertheim, Indonesian Society in Transition (2nd ed. The
Hague, 1964), pp. 209-17.
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tion, enunciated by President Wilson among his ‘Fourteen Points’ for the
settlement of Europe in 1918, had universal validity. It provided them with
a rallying-cry against their alien rulers.
The awakening process began earlier in the Philippines than in any
other South-East Asian country. This was only to be expected, since the
Filipinos had been longer under Western rule than any other people of
the area, and had been exposed to the most intense cultural pressure by
Spain. 1 The islands had been closely tied to Mexico, and had made little
economic progress. But in the nineteenth century, with the growth of
much freer trade with the outside world, a prosperous middle class of
Filipinos emerged, whose sons went abroad to study, and developed
strong reformist ideas. Men of this class, such as Jose Rizal and Marcelo
H. del Pilar, became the leaders of a nationalist propaganda movement
demanding reforms, though not separation from Spain. But Rizal’s
moderate Liga Filipino was suppressed, only to be followed by a nation-
wide revolutionary secret society, Katipunan, seeking to overturn Spanish
rule by force. In 1897 it set up its own revolutionary government under
Emilio Aguinaldo, but this was suppressed. A new rising in the following
year became involved in the United States’ war with Spain, and, as we
have seen above, was ultimately crushed by the Americans after the
transfer of the Philippines by Spain.
The United States’ interest in the Philippines was purely strategic; but
when the Americans became aware of the intensity of Filipino nationalism,
they gave their promise that they would fully respect Filipino customs,
habits and traditions, and provide for the ‘amplest liberty of self-govern-
ment’. They kept their promise. Moreover, realising that democracy
demanded a much wider dissemination of education than under the Spanish
regime, they set in motion a vast educational campaign with English as
the medium of instruction. Education was America’s most important
contribution to the Philippines ; expenditure upon it accounted for a much
higher percentage of the colonial budget than in any other country of
South-East Asia. They retained much of the framework of the Spanish
administration, but injected a liberal dose of representative government
into it, both at the centre and throughout the local divisions of provinces,
municipalities and townships. This involved the formation of political
parties, most of which began by agitating for immediate independence.
From the first meeting of the Philippine Assembly in 1907 until the
Japanese occupation in the second world war, one party, the Nacionalista,
maintained complete dominance, chiefly through the leadership of three
outstanding personalities, the American-trained lawyers Sergio Osmena
(b. 1878) and Manuel L. Quezon, and the brilliant Manuel Roxas, a
product of the University of the Philippines.
1 The latest study of the subject is John L. Phelan’s The Hispanization of the Philippines
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1959).
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Within a very short time the United States had introduced into the
Philippines a form of democracy resembling its own; one, however, with
severe limitations, for the landed gentry and the intelligentsia, interested
solely in preserving their own social and economic privileges, were the
effectual recipients of the powers transferred. Their manipulation of the
administration reduced the majority of the owner-cultivators to share-
cropping tenants or wage-earners. The inclusion of the Philippines in the
United States tariff area in 1909 further strengthened the hands of the
landlord class, for it favoured the large-scale production of sugar, abaci,
coconut-oil and copra for export, with private corporations and large-
estate owners in control. The expansion of such cash crops was achieved
partially at the expense of food production, and the ‘ sugar-baron ’ became
politically more powerful than the ‘rice-baron’. 1 Further, the Philippines
became more dependent upon the United States than any other country
of South-East Asia upon its own metropolitan power, with the inevitable
consequence of industrial underdevelopment.
By the ’thirties opinion in the United States began to veer strongly in
favour of Philippine independence, and in 1934 Congress provided for a
ten-year period of preparation for self-government and permitted the
summons of a Philippine Constituent Assembly to draft a written con-
stitution. In return for these concessions the United States was to retain
its military and naval bases, until full independence was achieved.
No sooner, however, were the Philippines well and truly set on the road
to complete self-government than the international situation began to
darken both in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese invasion of China
caused such alarm that Philippine policy took a sharp turn in the
direction of closer association with America, and General Douglas
MacArthur, appointed military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth,
began to raise and train a native army with the assistance of American
funds.
During the first two centuries of their rule in Indonesia the Dutch were
so eager to maintain their commercial monopoly that they paid no heed
whatever to its effects upon native institutions. The cultuurstelsel, in-
augurated in the first half of the nineteenth century, became the most
effective system ever devised for the exploitation of native production,
and yielded a vast colonial surplus, the batig slot, to the home govern-
ment. Liberalism’s prescription for the remedy of the evils which this
wrought in Java was to open the door as wide as possible for private
enterprise, again with no guarantee for the interests of the Indonesians.
Hence the ‘ethical policy’ of the early twentieth century came as a sort
of eleventh-hour repentance. Decentralisation was to be the method and
the village community (desa) the chief means for enhancing native welfare.
Little by little an elaborate village administration was built up. But so
1 E. H. Jacoby, Agrarian Unrest in South-East Asia (New York, 1949), pp. 184-5.
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great was the degree of Dutch paternal control that it was impossible for
anything of the nature of real village autonomy to develop.
The first signs of Indonesian nationalism showed themselves early in
the century in the activities of the gifted Raden Adjeng Kartini, daughter
of the regent of Japara, whose letters, published in 1911, stimulated the
release of a native spiritual energy which was a new phenomenon in
Netherlands India. Both she and DrWaidin Soedira Oesada, a retired
medical officer, who began a campaign for the advancement of Java in
1906, looked to the spread of Western education as the means of salvation.
In 1908 he founded the first nationalist association, Boedi Oetimo, ‘High
Endeavour’, with a membership mainly of intellectuals and officials. It
was soon followed, in 19 1 1, by an association of a very different character.
Sarekat Islam, a popular movement which, beginning as a combination
of Javanese batik traders against Chinese exploitation, became within a
few years a revolutionary political party holding national congresses,
organising strikes and demanding independence. The Communist Revolu-
tion in Russia in 1917 had immediate effects upon the situation in Java.
An energetic Communist section (‘ Section B’), closely in touch with Mos-
cow, attempted to gain control over Sarekat Islam. Failing in this object,
it formed the Perserikatan Komunist India (P.K.I.) and broke away from
the parent body, which, although Socialist in outlook, remained firmly
attached to nationalist and religious ideals. In 1922, under the influence
of native graduates from Europe discontented with the status of natives
in the government services, Sarekat Islam established relations with the
Indian National Congress and adopted a policy of non-co-operation.
The post-war depression with its crop of industrial disputes presented
the extremists with just the kind of opportunity they required for bringing
about the maximum dislocation of political and economic life. Moscow
regarded Java as a strategic centre of the highest importance. Through
agents in Singapore, contact was made between the P.K.I. and the Chinese
Communists. From 1923 onwards a series of revolutionary strikes, cul-
minating in November 1926 in a sudden revolt, chiefly in west Java but
also in the neighbouring parts of Sumatra, led the Dutch to take severe
repressive measures. The Communist leaders and hundreds of their fol-
lowers were interned in New Guinea and the movement petered out. In the
following year Dr Soekamo’s Perserikatan Nasional Indonesia (National
Indonesian Party), which had attempted to imitate the Gandhi technique,
was also broken up and its leader imprisoned. Firm repression and a strict
censorship of the press checked the Indonesian political movement.
Much of the trouble of these post-war years was the result of disappoint-
ment at Dutch unwillingness to effect any real transfer of power. Their
high-sounding promises meant very little in practice. During the first world
war, in response to insistent nationalist demands for a greater share in the
government, a Volksraad was brought into existence in 1917, but it had a
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European majority, half its members were nominated, and its powers were
narrowly limited. This development was associated with a general scheme
of decentralisation in the provinces, but the new system was slow in taking
shape, and was completed only shortly before the Japanese invasion. It
represented the utmost concessions the Dutch were prepared to make.
The rapid expansion of the motor industry after 1900 revolutionised
South-East Asia’s position in world affairs. In 1938 the Netherlands East
Indies, Malaya, French Indo-China, Siam, Burma, British North Borneo
and Sarawak produced practically the whole of the world’s rubber and
more than half of its tin, with the United States as the chief purchaser and
Malaya as the principal producer of both commodities. The great expan-
sion in Malaya’s rubber and tin production was achieved by British and
Chinese enterprise and capital. It involved so large an influx of Chinese
and Indian immigrants that by 1941 Malays formed no more than 41 per
cent of the population and were outnumbered by the Chinese. They re-
mained for the most part tenant farmers growing rice, too proud to be
interested in the economic progress which transformed their country, and
too shiftless to use the more modern methods placed at their disposal by
the British.
It has been said that there has never been a race less politically minded
and less interested in economic development. Hence the main problem
that emerged was, in the words of Professor L. A. Mills, ‘ how to reconcile
the legitimate interests of foreign capital and the immigrant races with the
equally valid claim of the Malays to a larger share in the government of
their own country’. As most of the Chinese and Indians were only
temporarily in the country, the Malays alone developed any sort of
Malayan patriotism. Before the Japanese conquest in the second world
war this was limited to a very small middle class, which had absorbed a
certain amount of Western education. Resentment against Chinese and
Indians played its part, as also did the religious revival which occurred
throughout the Muslim world after the first world war.
Indirect rule in the Federated States was a facade behind which the
Chief Secretary at Kuala Lumpur and his dependent civil service ruled
as it were a single unit, and with immense efficiency. In the Unfederated
States advisers had to promote co-ordination of policy by means of advice
and persuasion. The Straits Settlements were under a Governor assisted
by an Executive Council and a small Legislative Council, all the members
of which were appointed up to 1924, when two British members, elected
by the Chambers of Commerce of Singapore and Penang, were added.
The non-official members included one Malay and three Chinese. There
was always an official majority which was bound to support the Governor’s
policy. In practice, however, much deference was shown to the views of
the non-officials. There was strikingly little demand for any change in this
form of government. British and Chinese economic interests feared the
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results of any relaxation of control by devolution of power to the sultans,
but British administrators were not happy about the situation, and in the
’thirties a very stiff controversy raged around it. Finally a decentralisation
policy was adopted; the Chief Secretaryship was abolished in 1935 and
some additional powers transferred to the State Councils of the sultans.
In this way the responsibility for the co-ordination of policy passed to the
High Commissioner and his ‘mouthpiece’, the Federal Secretary, while
the prestige of the sultans was enhanced. Up to the Japanese invasion in
1941 the Colonial Office in London remained firmly wedded to the policy
of decentralisation, and further steps in that direction only awaited judge-
ment of the effects of the changes introduced in 1935.
Burma, annexed piecemeal by the British between 1826 and 1886, was
reunited as a province of British India at the time of the third, and final,
annexation on 1 January 1886. The ‘march to Mandalay’ had been almost
bloodless, but with the fall of the monarchy serious resistance on a national
scale broke out and imposed upon the British a long and heavy task of
‘pacification’. Afterwards Burma remained quiescent for a long period.
At the beginning of the twentieth century its administration was very much
like that of any other Indian province, with a handful of British civil
servants at the top directing the operations of a hierarchy of Asian sub-
ordinates, among whom Indians held many of the key posts and were
thereby a source of dissatisfaction to Burmese opinion. The urge for
modernisation and efficiency was beginning to make itself felt in a big
expansion of governmental functions involving the creation of specialist
departments, and transforming the older paternal system into a bureau-
cracy. Now, for the first time under British rule, the wind of change began
to blow at village level, with the creation of a new system of local admini-
stration based upon the village, and the increasing interference in its daily
life of officials of the central government. At the turn of the century a
swing was in progress away from the monastic schools, once of funda-
mental importance in Burmese life, to lay education maintained or aided
by government, and with an emphasis upon secondary and higher educa-
tion in English. The consequent resentment of the Buddhist monks, and
the failure of the British administration to maintain the royal patronage
of the Sangha after Thibaw’s deposition, were important factors in the
decline of monastic discipline, which became serious in the 1920s, and in
an upsurge of anti-British agitation by nationalist monks, especially in the
villages.
National sentiment among laymen expressed itself in the Buddhist
revivalism of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, founded in 1906,
and an agitation some ten years later for the prohibition of shoe-wearing
at pagodas and other sacred places. External observers, however, thought
the Burmese politically apathetic, especially when the announcement by
Edwin Montagu in 1917 of his plan for the development of responsible
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government in India evoked from the Burmese only a demand for separa-
tion from India. How mistaken they were was demonstrated dramatically
by the sudden outburst of popular indignation in 1920 when Burma was
not included in the Montagu-Chelmsford plan for establishing dyarchy
in the Indian provinces. The discontent expressed itself most forcibly in a
students’ strike in the newly established University of Rangoon and in
government and missionary schools throughout the country, and in the
organisation of a system of ‘national schools’ under a Council of National
Education. The British government hastened to extend dyarchy to Burma,
and in 1923 she received a new Legislative Council of 103 members, 79 of
whom were elected on a democratic franchise. To it was assigned control
over the departments of Education, Public Health, Forests and Excise
through ministers chosen from its elected members.
The national movement now grew rapidly. The extremists, taking Ireland
as their model, advocated violent revolution. The General Council of
Burmese Associations boycotted the first elections to the Legislative
Council, and secret Bu Athins carried on intimidation and a no-tax cam-
paign in the villages. The distress caused by the Great Depression in 1930
led to increasing violence. An anti-Indian movement resulted in sanguinary
riots in 1930, and again in 1938. In December 1930 full-scale rebellion
broke out in the rice-producing regions worst hit by the slump; it was led
by an ex-monk proclaiming messianic prophecies once associated with the
monarchy.
Nevertheless, within its limits dyarchy worked. The legislature had a
solidly nationalist majority, with which it often embarrassed the govern-
ment, but never jammed it; and there were moderates anxious to promote
social welfare. Their insistent demands, however, were for immediate
self-government and separation from India. But the struggles among rival
factions for power made the period of dyarchy singularly barren in reform
legislation. In 1937, when India achieved provincial autonomy, Burma
achieved separation together with a bi-cameral parliament and cabinet
government. So much additional power was transferred that, even allow-
ing for the governor’s ‘reserve’ powers, the new government had effectual
control over practically the whole range of the internal affairs of Burma
proper; the Shans, Kachins, Karens of the hills and Chins were excluded
from the scheme. The nationalists were still unsatisfied, but, had it not
been for the menace of war in Europe, and the growing danger from Japan
in the Pacific, Burma might have gradually and unobtrusively achieved
dominion status without any major change in the framework of her con-
stitution. It is significant that the nationalist agitation was confined to the
Burmans: the non-Burman minority peoples saw the British as their pro-
tectors against the threat of Burman dominance.
National pride gave the initial stimulus in the creation of French Indo-
China. It began with the chauvinism of the Second Empire and continued
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as a reaction against the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war. The
French never felt quite the same sense of responsibility for the welfare of
their subjects as the British and the Dutch. They were bent on exploiting
the wealth of the region for the benefit of France. Next to that, but a long
way behind, and largely through force of circumstances, came the desire
to spread French culture. Any idea of training the natives for ultimate
autonomy was utterly repellent. The royal houses of Annam, Cambodia
and Laos were left with a semblance of authority, but all real power was
in the hands of the French Governor-General, who was the head of a
highly centralised administration.
There was a curious inconsistency about French policy; for, while few
French officials spoke the languages or could appreciate the outlook of the
people they governed, a comparatively small coterie of French oriental
scholars in the Ecole fran^ais d’Extreme-Orient, established at Hanoi
in 1899, carried out the most remarkable researches into the languages,
customs, history and archaeology of Indo-China, to use the term in its
widest possible application.
But against that undoubtedly great achievement must be set the ruin of
the native land economy over large regions in order to promote French
agricultural colonisation, and the creation of a rich landowner class
exploiting the labour of an ignorant, apathetic peasantry. Under French
rule Indo-China became, along with Siam and Burma, one of the largest
rice-exporting areas of the world. It became the most profitable of all
France’s overseas possessions. But the wages of the great mass of the
people remained pitifully low, and it is small wonder that Communism
developed stronger roots in French Indo-China than anywhere else in
South-East Asia.
The Vietnamese, with a Chinese civilisation, are the most advanced
culturally of the peoples of the Indo-Chinese Union. Vietnamese national-
ism began largely as the product of the French-vernacular schools estab-
lished for the training of native subordinates. To counteract it the French
injected stronger doses of French culture through the higher schools and
the University of Hanoi. But the opposite effect took place, and it was
commented that the bitterest opponents of the French were those who
knew the language best. Thus, when in 1907 Paul Beau as a concession
to nationalism founded the University of Hanoi, such an outburst of the
disease it was intended to cure resulted that in the following year it was
closed, and was not reopened until 1917. The French made the same
mistake as the British in Burma of neglecting vernacular education. As
early as 1910 an observer noted significantly that the ‘curves of crime and
European education rose concurrently’.
The Vietnamese nationalist movement became a serious embarrassment
to the French after the first world war, when the educated official class
was stirred alike by the Western doctrine of self-determination and the
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Indian Swaraj movement. Communism also became a potent force, and
by 1925 there was a revolutionary party, mainly composed of students who
imbibed their Communism from the Cantonese. In 1930 and 1931 there
were small nationalist and Communist risings in Tongking, which the
French ruthlessly suppressed with hundreds of executions. For years the
anti-French movement was driven underground and largely lost its
effectiveness.
In 1938 Japan, having delivered China a series of staggering blows in
her second great offensive, which had begun in July of the previous year,
announced the ‘New Order’ in East Asia. As publicly proclaimed it had
two facets, the one anti-Communist, the other anti-Western. Two years
later, at the moment of German military triumph in western Europe, she
announced the creation of a ‘ co-prosperity sphere ’, and invited the various
countries of South-East Asia to participate in it. South-East Asia had by
that time become, in the production of the food and raw materials re-
quired by modem technological civilisation, incomparably the richest
region in the world for its size. Of all its parts Netherlands India was the
one most coveted by Japan, but all her attempts to persuade the Dutch
to participate in the co-prosperity plan failed, and Japan realised that
only by war could she achieve her objective.
It is a fact of some significance that up to the time when she committed
herself to her great southward offensive in 1941 Japan had failed to stimu-
late in South-East Asian countries anything of the nature of a nationalist
rising against the Western powers. Nor were the Japanese campaigns
materially assisted by the nationalist movements in the various countries
which they overran: nowhere were they welcomed as liberators. There
were collaborators such as Ir. Soekamo and Mohammad Hatta in Indo-
nesia and Ba Maw and Aung San in Burma; but there were equally sincere
nationalists, such as the Sumatrans Amir Sjariffoedin and Soetan Sjahrir,
who would have nothing whatever to do with the Japanese. The great mass
of the people saw the tide of conquest roll over them with a sort of
bewildered helplessness.
The astounding rapidity and ease with which the Japanese overran
South-East Asia caused the Western powers a loss of prestige that was in
many ways decisive. But it was not long before Japanese arrogance and
brutality, and still more their ruthless exploitation of native manpower
and economic resources, made them feared and detested. Everywhere
resistance groups sprang up, often led by European officers left behind
by the retreating armies or parachuted into the various countries. During
the counter-invasion of 1945 the Burma National Army, largely organised
by the Japanese, went over to the Allies and played a useful part in harry-
ing the retreating Japanese.
The capitulation of the Japanese in August 1945 came so suddenly that
in two regions where the Allied armies were not operating, French Indo-
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China and Dutch Indonesia, there was a hiatus before Allied occupation
could be carried out, and nationalist movements seized control, largely
with Japanese assistance. Ho Chi-minh and his followers gained control
over the puppet Annamite government, the emperor Bao Dai abdicated
and the Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed. In Indonesia there was an
unavoidable delay of over a month after the Japanese surrender before
South-East Asia Command could begin the occupation of Java. Moreover,
the Netherlands had been so recently freed from German occupation that
the home government was unprepared to deal with the situation created
by the sudden Japanese collapse. The way was open therefore for Soekamo,
supported by Sjahrir and Hatta, to proclaim the Indonesian Republic.
Neither France nor the Netherlands would recognise the authority of the
new revolutionary governments in their pre-war empires, and both made
preparations to regain as much as possible of their lost power.
In Burma and Malaya the British were welcomed as liberators and
within a very few weeks were able to restore civil government. In both
countries, however, the experiences of the war years had created a new
political atmosphere. In Burma the British plan was to carryout rehabilita-
tion measures for a short period under direct rule before restoring the
constitution of 1937. Then elections for a constituent assembly were to be
held, and the Burmese were to draft their own constitution as a self-
governing dominion of the British Commonwealth. But Aung San, the
commander of the National Army, and his associates of the Dobama
Asiayone (‘We Burmans Association’), demanded immediate complete
independence. They had organised the nation-wide Anti-Fascist Peoples
Freedom League and made it the focus of nationalist aspirations. Their
experience of Japanese rule and of the ‘independence’ granted by Japan
to Burma on 1 August 1943 had sharpened their desire for real indepen-
dence, and they wanted to prevent foreign business interests from regain-
ing their old position in the national economy. They effectively opposed
every ministry formed by the British governor after the restoration of
civil government, as well as British attempts to restore order and promote
economic recovery. Accordingly in October 1946 Governor Sir Hubert
Ranee accepted their demand for an AFPFL-dominated Council of
Ministers with Aung San as its leader. In the following January Aung San
reached agreement in London with Mr Attlee’s Labour government
whereby his ministry was given full control over internal affairs, and
Britain pledged herself to accept the verdict of a general election to be held
in April 1947 to determine the form of self-government.
The most urgent question was the fierce opposition of the non-Burman
peoples — the Shans, Kachins, Karens and Chins — against any arrange-
ment involving Burman supremacy. The Aung San-Attlee agreement
contained a proviso safeguarding their rights, and immediately after
returning to Burma Aung San started negotiations which ultimately
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secured their agreement to the terms on which they would join the pro-
posed Union of Burma ; and these were duly written into the constitution.
The Karens, however, stood out and demanded a separate state under British
protection. But the fact that the great majority of them lived in Burma
proper, forming a minority in every district where they were settled, made
their demand quite impracticable, and Britain had — sadly — to reject it.
This was one of Burma’s unsolved problems when in July 1947 Aung San
and most of his cabinet were murdered by the hired assassins of a political
rival. Sir Hubert Ranee at once nominated Aung San’s close friend U Nu
to the premiership, and it was with him that the British government
negotiated the treaty by which on 4 January 1948 the Union of Burma
became a sovereign independent state. Burma elected to become a republic
outside the British Commonwealth. Thus at the outset did she manifest
the isolationism which later came to dominate her policy.
Malay national sentiment realised itself as a political force for the first
time during the war, and its rallying cry, ‘ Malaya for the Malays’, became
directed, after the Japanese departure, against the Chinese. British policy
was to bring to an end the particularism of the individual states, which
had facilitated the Japanese victory, and accordingly in 1946 all nine
Malay states together with Penang and Malacca were joined to form the
Malayan Union. The free port of Singapore with its preponderatingly
Chinese population was excluded. With it Chinese would have out-
numbered Malays in the Union. Moreover, the new union depended upon
customs duties for most of its revenue. The Union was seen as a first step
towards Malayan independence ; but the transfer of sovereignty from the
sultans to Britain and the generous citizenship rules for non-Malays caused
so strong a Malay reaction that Britain yielded to their clamour. In 1948
a Federation took the place of the Union, the sultans regained their
former powers, and the citizenship rules for non-Malays were stiffened up.
The anti-Chinese attitude of the Malays was an important factor in the
Chinese-led Communist insurrection which began in 1948, and, though
never with the faintest hope of success, caused the British authorities
acute embarrassment and immense effort over a matter of years. It did
not, however, adversely affect Malaya’s constitutional progress, which was
faster than that of any other colonial territory up to that time. Exactly
how rapid was the transfer of power may be gauged from the following
facts : Malaya’s first general election was held only in 1955, and its Legisla-
tive Council then received its first elected majority; full independence
within the British Commonwealth came on 31 August 1957. This would
have been impossible but for the growth of co-operation in the national
interest between its two major racial parties, the United Malays National
Organization (UMNO) and the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA).
Singapore’s progress towards independence was less rapid. Her strategic
importance and the strength of her Communist front were factors milita-
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ting against a complete transfer of power. It was only when, under Lim
Yew Hock’s leadership, firm action was taken against left-wing violence
and subversion that the British government felt itself able to concede
almost complete self-government, in June 1959, subject to special security
measures. The leftist People’s Action Party won the first general election.
Its leader Lee Kuan-yew proved more than a match for the Communists.
A realist in his assessment of Singapore’s economic and strategic position,
he became an ardent promoter of the island’s reunion with Malaya.
To complete the story of the disappearance of the colonial regimes from
South-East Asia one must turn now from the territories under British rule
to those of the United States, the Netherlands and France. The Philippines
was the first country in all South-East Asia to achieve independence, when
the United States granted it in July 1946 in accordance with the promise
made when the Tydings-McDuffie Commonwealth Act was passed in
1934. In Indonesia there was a long and cruel struggle between the Dutch
and the Indonesian Republic proclaimed in August 1945. World opinion
turned heavily against the Dutch when they began the first of what they
termed ‘police actions’. The intervention of the United Nations Security
Council at the instance of India and Australia, and its creation of a Good
Offices Committee to supervise the situation and promote negotiations,
was an important cause of the failure of the Dutch attempt at a solution
by force. In December 1949 the Netherlands and Indonesia reached an
agreement whereby the latter’s independence was established.
It was Vietnam’s tragedy that her struggle for independence against
France came under Communist direction, for after the Communist triumph
in China late in 1949 it became merged in America’s crusade against
world Communism. When it became obvious that they could not crush
Ho Chi-minh and the Viet Minh and its ‘Democratic Republic of Viet-
nam’, the French sought to build up the ex-Emperor Bao Dai as the
national leader; but everyone knew that he was their puppet, whereas
Ho Chi-minh was successfully challenging France. The recognition of his
regime by China and the Soviet bloc was countered by the recognition of
Bao Dai’s by the United States and the powers associated with her; and
American aid began to flow into Vietnam, via Paris. But as America be-
came more and more committed to the struggle, particularly after the
termination of the Korean war, France’s effort began to flag before the
determination and skilful generalship of the Viet Minh. It had little
support from the Vietnamese, and became increasingly unpopular at
home. American aid, however, mounted and with it pressure for a military
decision. Hence the ‘Navarre Plan’, which came to grief in the disaster
at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French were outgeneralled in the
operations leading up to it, but even more important was the material aid
given by China. Her concern was rather over the security of her frontiers
than over the interests of Vietnamese Communism. But the danger of the
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outbreak of another world war was now acute, with America ready with
massive support for the French. Happily the forces pressing for a nego-
tiated settlement prevailed, and in July under the joint chairmanship of
Britain and Russia armistice agreements were signed at Geneva. Vietnam
was provisionally partitioned at the 17th parallel of latitude with the
Democratic Republic in control of the north and the Saigon regime,
nominally headed by Bao Dai, in control of the south. It was provided
that elections under international supervision were to be held in July 1956
to decide on the form of reunification. France withdrew from Indo-China,
and the independence of the kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos became
something more than a political formula. The elections were never held.
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CHAPTER XII
CHINA, JAPAN AND THE PACIFIC 1900-1931
* t the beginning of the twentieth century, the countries of the Far East
/\ and the Pacific were regarded by the West from the standpoint of
1 x imperialism. Economically, they were important to it as sources of
raw materials, fields of investment, and markets for manufactured goods.
Politically, their relations with Western powers were conducted on terms
of inequality. Some countries — especially China — had been compelled to
grant the powers concessions in relation to trade and investment and
jurisdiction in respect of the latters’ nationals residing within their boun-
daries. Others had become colonies or protectorates. Even Australia,
which became a federal Commonwealth in 1901, and New Zealand were
not exceptions to the general situation. As high-income countries with
predominantly European populations, they occupied advantageous posi-
tions within the framework of imperialism; but, though they possessed
responsible government, they were subject to British control of their
external relations. Japan alone had reached a stage at which the Western
powers were beginning to treat her as a full member of the community
of nations.
The international standing of Japan had been attained over a remarkably
short period. Till the 1850s the country had maintained, for over two
hundred years, a policy of seclusion mitigated only by limited contacts
with the Chinese and the Dutch. But, within less than fifty years of its
enforced entry into treaty relations with the Western powers, it had carried
through a programme of political modernisation unequalled elsewhere in
Asia. This adaptation to the circumstances of the new age was facilitated
by the characteristics of Japanese social and political structure. Like
Britain, Japan was an island country in proximity to a highly civilised
continent. As such, it had been able to draw upon the cultural heritage
of China, and at the same time, to develop a sense of its own distinctive
identity. In these circumstances, the survival of clan loyalties had not
prevented the early emergence of a unified system of government, though
it had provided opportunities for the exercise of regional initiative. The
political structure centred upon the Shogun and, through him, nominally
upon the emperor, was an oligarchic one. Responsibility was diffused
among the members of privileged groups; and decisions were reached by
discussion and negotiation. This type of structure had encouraged the
development of bureaucratic procedures and of a relationship between
government and governed defined in terms of law and custom, rather than
in those of personal authority. It had also provided channels for the
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examination of proposed reforms and for their implementation by evolu-
tionary means.
For more than half a century before the opening of diplomatic relations
with the Western powers, groups within the Japanese elite had been dis-
cussing the need for political changes. The time was ripe for reform ; and
the action of the powers precipitated it. The office of Shogun, whose holder
had for centuries exercised the powers of the emperor, was brought into
disrepute by the humiliation inflicted by the West. But the motives of its
antagonists were mixed. They were moved both by ambitions of a tradi-
tional order — rivalry towards the Tokugawa clan, which controlled the
office of Shogun — and by their attitudes towards the West. Though some
resented the inability of the Shogun to resist Western demands and others
recognised that Japan’s future was dependent on its adoption of Western
methods, their differing lines of thought converged at the level of political
action. In 1867, following the accession of a new emperor and a new
Shogun, a demand was successfully made for the return to the imperial
office of its full powers. In practice, this made the emperor dependent on
those who had engineered the restoration.
During the succeeding thirty years the structure of the Japanese state
was drastically reorganised. Feudal rights were terminated; a national
army was formed; a uniform and comprehensive legal system was intro-
duced; primary education was made compulsory; and a land tax was
imposed to provide the government with an adequate revenue. In deter-
mining the character of these reforms, the Japanese government drew
selectively upon the experience of the West. Contemporary developments
in Germany were considered to be of special relevance. In particular, they
provided a model for the constitution given to the country, in the name
of the emperor, in 1 889. This created a parliament, but limited its functions
in relation both to legislation and to control of finance and denied it power
to appoint or dismiss the cabinet. Through these changes, and a com-
plementary reorganisation of administrative structure and procedure,
Japan gained an efficient system of government in which a preponderant
authority rested with the executive. Since the programme of reform was
carried out as a consequence of the nominal restoration of the imperial
power, it could not be questioned on grounds of legitimacy. On the other
hand, by the establishment of a parliament and in other ways, it sought to
satisfy the aspirations of those who had responded to the stimulus of
contact with the West. Japan’s resounding victory over China in the war
of 1894-5 provided the Western powers with conclusive evidence of the
success of the reorganisation.
Japanese policy had been one of enlightened conservatism. It had there-
fore been pragmatic, leaving virtually untouched those elements in the
older social and political structure that presented no challenge to the new
objectives. At the village level, for example, where government impinged
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most closely on the day-to-day activities of the conservative masses, local
administration was little changed. And in other fields, where change was
a matter of gradual evolution, rather than statutory enactment, traditional
forms of organisation survived.
In the economic sphere, a framework for modernisation had been
created by the establishment of capitalistic institutions. But, at the turn
of the century, the impact of new industries and technology from the
West remained limited. The great majority of Japanese still worked in
agriculture, the production of handicrafts and fishing. Even in such
areas of modem industry as existed, the introduction of new technical
methods was more striking than any increase in the scale of operation.
Cotton spinning was the main exception, with the emergence of large-scale
factories in the 1890s; and there were as well several large government
factories for military supplies, especially the arsenals at Tokyo and Osaka.
In silk, power-driven filatures now accounted for half the production,
although this was carried out in small establishments. Small-scale factory
production also existed in such industries as cement, glass, beer and paper.
In heavy industry development was meagre. Production of pig-iron
amounted to some 25,000 tons, and practically the entire steel demand,
which was only about a quarter of a million tons, was met from abroad.
Similarly engineering and shipbuilding were on a very small scale, while
coal output, although rising rapidly, was still only five million tons in
1895. The extent of the transformation in the economy is difficult to
measure; but it seems that within manufacturing, where modern develop-
ments had probably gone furthest, something like three times as many
found employment in the home as in the factory, and of course most
factories were small and a far cry from modern Western establishments.
The effects of modernisation on the structure of the economy were by
then beginning to be felt in the changing commodity composition of
Japanese foreign trade. Raw silk was still the major export, but silk and
cotton textiles and coal were rapidly increasing in importance. The develop-
ment of the cotton textile industry began to show its effect on imports
through the decline in importance of cotton fibres and yams and the
growth of raw cotton to some 20 per cent of total imports. Sugar and iron
and steel products were other prominent imports. The opening of Japan
to the West and the influence of foreign trade after the 1850s were the
main causes of change in the Japanese economy, yet the reciprocal effect,
that of Japan’s entry into the international economy on world trading
patterns, remained slight. Although by the end of the ’nineties foreign
trade had risen in value to about a quarter of national income, it was still
only some 6 per cent of Britain’s trade; and only in silk was Japan a world
trader on an important scale. An important limiting factor on the growth
of foreign trade had been the almost inflexible suspicion of the Japanese
government towards the importation of foreign capital, so that imports
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were limited in value by earnings from exports and whatever specie Japan
could supply.
By 1900 Japan had created a basis for the conduct of political and
economic relations with the Western nations on terms of equality. Her
position was, in some respects, still a relatively weak or precarious one;
but, economically as well as politically, the essential breakthrough was
being achieved. Like China, she had been compelled in her original treaties
with the powers to grant them extra-territorial rights and to accept a
limitation on the customs duties she could impose on their products. In
1899 extra-territoriality was finally abolished and tariff autonomy virtually
attained. Two years earlier she had joined the rest of the trading community
on the gold standard and had begun overseas borrowing on a large scale.
More generally, the strength of Japan’s international position was a product
not only of her external policies — diplomatic and military — but also of the
recognition by the powers of the success of her internal reorganisation.
The position of China in 1900 was, on the contrary, the cumulative
product of a succession of failures and defeats. In terms of domestic
political structure, China had been for many centuries the largest country
in the world subjected to the effective control of a single centralised
administration. In those of external relations, her predominance in eastern
Asia had been so great that she had recognised other states not as equals
but only as tributaries. This heritage had, in itself, greatly complicated the
task of adaptation to the conditions created by the expansion of the West.
The government of China was cumbrous, slow to accept the need for
change in either its principles or its procedures. The port cities on the
coast and on the great rivers which were frequented by foreign merchants
were distant from the capital at Peking. The scope and character of the
threat to the ancient political order was not readily understood by those
who alone had the power to take major decisions. The need to adopt a
system of external relations based on the western concept of sovereignty
was neither accepted nor even recognised.
The effect of the inherent restraints upon adaptation was intensified by
the particular condition of the Chinese political system in the nineteenth
century. The country was passing through a period of dynastic decline.
The civil service was deeply penetrated by corruption. The Manchu garri-
sons, which were responsible for the maintenance of security, had lost
most of their military prowess. The southern provinces were disaffected.
Because of these circumstances, and because the dynasty itself was of
alien Manchu origin, conformity with established conventions attained an
overriding importance. In establishing themselves as rulers, the Manchus
had become patrons and inflexible defenders of traditional Chinese culture.
During their decline, they came to look upon sympathy towards innova-
tion with increasing suspicion. The government service was dominated by
men of unquestionable orthodoxy.
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In these circumstances, the process of Western expansion in China was
characterised by determined aggression, on the one side, and fumbling
resistance, on the other. Agents of the West — primarily merchants, naval
commanders and diplomats — took the initiative in ways that were sanc-
tioned by the conventions of their own cultures; and many Chinese took
advantage of the opportunities that their activities opened up. At each
stage, resistance (or reluctance in collaboration) by the government of
China was made the occasion for the presentation of further demands,
to which the government, after a display of force by the Western powers,
was compelled to agree. The scope of Western encroachment was limited
only by the anxiety of the powers not to precipitate a complete breakdown
of political order in China or, towards the end of the century, by their
suspicion of each other’s ambitions.
The difficulties of foreign merchants at Canton led to war between
Britain and China in 1839 and the subsequent British victory to the signa-
ture of a group of treaties under which the powers gained their first sub-
stantial privileges. Five ports were opened to foreign trade; a customs
tariff and a code of trade regulations were agreed on; and extra-territorial
rights were granted to foreign residents. In addition, Britain obtained the
cession of Hong Kong. As a result of these concessions, the foreign com-
munities in the treaty ports developed into autonomous settlements com-
pletely removed from the jurisdiction of the government of China and
providing a location for the establishment of modem commercial and
industrial ventures. When the Chinese refused to discuss the extension of
Western privileges in the 1850s, war was again resorted to; and new
treaties were forced upon them. The number of open ports was greatly
increased; the Yangtze river was opened to trade; and customs duties,
which had already begun to be administered by a foreign-controlled
customs service, were limited to 5 per cent ad valorem. By i860 China was
almost completely at the mercy of its Western invaders.
Thirty-five years later the Sino- Japanese war precipitated a further stage
in China’s collapse. Already the relationship between China and some of
its former tributary states had been severed ; and the country’s northern
frontiers had been encroached upon by Russia. In 1895 the terms imposed
by Japan included a renunciation of Chinese suzerainty over Korea and
the cession of Formosa. Japan’s success was followed by a spate of fresh
demands from the Western powers. Britain, France, Germany and Russia
engaged in a scramble for concessions. Leaseholds were obtained over
strategically or economically important areas; monopoly rights for the
building of railways and the exploitation of minerals were conceded; and
broad ‘ spheres of interest ’ were recognised. Within these latter, a particular
power gained a prior claim to future concessions and an assurance that
monopoly rights or leased territories would not be obtained by its rivals.
The powers — including Japan — were preparing for the partition of China.
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The modernisation of the Chinese economy in response to the opening
of the country to Western influence remained slight. Until 1895 industrial
change was almost negligible, and there were only several hundred miles
of railways. The vast majority of Chinese still obtained their living from
traditional occupations centred on agriculture. The government, which
was unconcerned with the development of a modem economy, had
borrowed only some £13 million up to 1894; and direct foreign investment
was confined mainly to fields connected with trade, such as shipping,
insurance and banking, and, to a small extent, to the illegal establishment
of manufacturing in the treaty ports. Trade was the main avenue of
Western economic influence. In value it was not large and totalled only
about £50 million in the middle ’nineties. Exports were dominated by
products of the traditional sector, especially tea, raw silk and silk goods,
which still made up over half the total value in the 1890s. In the same
years, opium still accounted for between 15 and 20 per cent of imports,
but cotton products (both goods and yam), which made up some 35 per
cent of the total, had become the largest item. Though exact figures are
unobtainable, it seems that during the nineteenth century Britain had by
far the largest share of Chinese foreign trade. By 1 900 Japan was challenging
this position. But the British Empire as a whole still supplied almost half
of China’s imports and took about a quarter of its exports.
Economically therefore, as well as politically, China remained a classical
field for the satisfaction of imperialist aspirations. The fact that it had not
been subjected to the final ignominy of colonial rule owed little, if any-
thing, to memories of its former grandeur and nothing to its present
strength. To some small extent, its survival had been assisted by the
American ‘ open door’ policy, directed towards the maintenance of equality
of commercial opportunity for the nationals of all the powers. But, funda-
mentally, it had maintained its nominal independence because none of
the powers was willing to press its demands to the point at which it might
have found itself at war with its rivals.
In the island groups of the Pacific, scattered over a vast area of ocean
to the south-eastward of China and Japan, the powers had not been
obliged to observe a similar restraint. In terms either of existing agricultural
production or of known deposits of minerals, the islands were of limited
value, though they were of importance to influential groups of merchants
and investors in several Western countries. Strategically, some islands with
good harbours were highly regarded as possible naval bases or coaling
stations, and the groups nearest to the British dependencies in Australia
and New Zealand had long been looked on with anxiety by the colonists,
lest they should come under the control of an unfriendly power. The actual
extension of political control was a consequence, in part, of arguments
relating to their economic and strategic value. But, in part also, it was a
result of circumstances of a different kind. In many island groups the
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activities of Europeans and Americans, as traders, planters, and labour
recruiters, had made the establishment of a colonial form of government
a prerequisite to the restoration of law and order. International rivalry in
relation to the islands was not of sufficient importance to make it a likely
cause of war.
By 1890 a substantial proportion of the major islands and island groups
had been acquired by one or other of the powers. Fiji and south-eastern
New Guinea were British colonies; New Caledonia and a number of
archipelagos centred on Tahiti were French; north-eastern New Guinea,
the northern Solomons and the Marshall Islands were German; and
western New Guinea was part of the Netherlands East Indies. During the
1890s the process of partition was carried almost to completion. The
territories annexed by the United States and Germany at this period were
later of some significance in world politics. The former acquired Hawaii,
Guam and eastern Samoa and the latter the Caroline Islands, the Marianas
(apart from Guam) and western Samoa. Together with the American
acquisition of the Philippines and with the new German concessions in
China, these developments greatly enhanced the stake of both powers in
Pacific affairs.
The period between 1900 and the outbreak of the first world war saw
the completion of changes that had begun during the nineteenth century:
the final collapse of imperial China ; the full acceptance of Japan as a major
power; and, with the agreement of 1906 making the New Hebrides an
Anglo-French condominium, the settlement of the only remaining issue
of political control in Oceania.
In 1900 a series of developments in the politics of the Far East was
precipitated by a fresh manifestation of Chinese disorder. In May of that
year adherents of an anti-Western sect, the Boxers, began destroying
telegraph lines and damaging railways in north China. In June they
entered Peking, where they massacred Chinese Christians, molested
foreigners and attacked the legations. The Boxers had always been
regarded as patriots, rather than rebels, by a section of the Chinese
court and administration. When British forces set out from the treaty
port of Tientsin to protect the legations and foreign nationals from Boxer
aggression, they were opposed by imperial troops. When they captured
the forts commanding the seaward approach to Tientsin, China declared
war on the powers. This was the blind triumph of reaction, the decision
of men — and of a woman, the empress dowager — whose judgement had
been impaired by the humiliations that the West had inflicted on the old
order in China. The viceroys of south China and the governor of Shantung,
Yuan Shik-k’ai, promptly decided to suppress the war edict and maintain
neutrality. In August an allied force entered Peking almost unopposed,
and the court fled from the capital (above, ch. v).
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A year later a peace protocol was signed. China was compelled to
punish those responsible for the insurrection, to apologise for the murders
of the German Minister and the Chancellor of the Japanese legation, and
to permit the foreign occupation of the route between Peking and the sea.
Some administrative changes were required; and a heavy indemnity was
imposed.
The Boxer rising had, however, more far-reaching repercussions. Though
the powers had acted together in suppressing it, they had done so in an
atmosphere of increasing mutual suspicion. Throughout the joint action,
they had been as much concerned with the advancement of their future
national interests as with the solution of their immediate common problem.
Moves by Russia in support of its position in Manchuria had, in particular,
aroused the fears of the other powers.
Russian interests in Manchuria were centred upon the Chinese Eastern
Railway. In addition, Russians were engaged in banking, coal-mining and
shipping, and in administrative and trading functions associated with the
construction and operation of the railway. 1 During June 1900 Boxer bands
became active in Manchuria, and in July the government of China ordered
its military forces to unite with them. Russia retaliated by obtaining the
co-operation of the provincial governors and by bringing in troops. The
result was a Russian military occupation of Manchuria, which was main-
tained after peace had been restored with China.
Russia’s retention of the position it had gained during the period of
disorder was, in itself, a threat to the interests of other powers. But it was
interpreted by them in a broader context: by Japan in relation to its own
increasing stake in Korea; by Britain in relation to Russian ambitions
further west (particularly in Persia) ; and by them all in relation to Russia’s
intention, which had been evident throughout the Boxer incident, to play
a lone hand in its dealings with China. In none of the countries concerned —
including Russia — was the structure of politics monolithic : different groups
favoured different policies. And the situation was one in which a number
of alternative lines of policy seemed possible. In Japan there was support
for an agreement with Russia, whereby the former would gain a free hand
in Korea in return for its acceptance of the primacy of the latter’s interests
in Manchuria. In Britain it seemed to many that an agreement with
Germany would provide the most effective support for the country’s Far
Eastern interests. But, in the event, the action that was taken by these two
powers was the formation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.
Circumstances favoured such a move. During recent years, relations
between the British and Japanese governments had been notably friendly,
and significant elements in the public of both countries had expressed
support for a closer association. None the less, both governments were
1 Andrew Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881-1904 (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1958), pp. 124-76.
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compelled to move with caution. Each would expose itself to domestic
attack if it replaced the advantages of non-alignment by a commitment
to joint military action without receiving adequate compensation. In the
early discussions, the Japanese sought a formal recognition of their
country’s paramount interests in Korea and the British an extension of
the terms of the proposed alliance to include the defence of India. But
Britain was unwilling to be automatically involved in a war over Korea
and Japan to accept commitments beyond the Far East. On the issue of
limitation to the Far East, Britain gave way. In relation to Korea, a solu-
tion was found in the careful wording of the treaty. The two powers
declared that they recognised the independence of China and Korea and
had no aggressive intentions in relation to either country. On the other
hand, they recognised that both possessed ‘ special interests’ in China and
that Japan was ‘ interested in a peculiar degree politically as well as com-
mercially and industrially’ in Korea. It would ‘be admissible for either
of them ... to safeguard those interests if threatened either by the aggres-
sive action of any other Power, or by disturbances arising’ in China or
Korea. If either party should become involved in war with a third power
in the course of safeguarding its interests, the other should come to its aid
only in the event of its enemy being joined by another power. The treaty
was signed on 30 January 1902. 1 It was supplemented by an exchange of
diplomatic notes. In these notes each power agreed to the use of its ports
in time of peace by the naval vessels of the other and undertook ‘to main-
tain, so far as may be possible, available for concentration in the waters of
the Extreme East a naval force superior to that of any third Power’. 2 These
provisions were of particular importance to Britain because of her world-
wide commitments. But, since the notes were kept secret, they were neces-
sarily excluded from the ensuing public explanations of the alliance.
In Britain, the alliance was justified by the government mainly on the
ground that it stabilised the situation in the Far East. In addition to
ensuring co-operation between Britain and Japan, it removed the risk that
the latter might make an agreement with Russia to the detriment of the
other powers. But in some quarters it was argued that it increased the
danger of Britain’s involvement in war and that Japan received far greater
benefits than Britain. The latter point was, indeed, not without substance.
The alliance placed Japan in a position to deal firmly with Russia, since
it was now unlikely that other powers could come to Russia’s aid if war
should break out. The British navy — as a deterrent to potential antagonists
or, if the worst should happen, as the active partner of the Japanese fleet —
1 On the Anglo-Japanese alliance, see Ian H. Nish, The Anglo- Japanese Alliance: The
Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894-1907 (London, 1966). For the text of the treaty of
1902, and a note on the treaties of 1905 and 191 1, see John V. A. MacMurray (ed.), Treaties
and Agreements with and concerning China, 1894-1919 (2 vols. New York, 1921), vol. 1,
pp. 324-6-
a Nish, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, pp. 217-18.
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provided the basis for a new sense of security. More generally, the alliance
marked Japan’s acceptance as a first-class power. For these reasons, news
of its establishment was received in Japan with great enthusiasm.
For a time it appeared as if British hopes of stability in the Far East
would be realised. Russia agreed to withdraw her troops from Manchuria.
But, after the first stage of that operation had been carried out, Russian
policy seemed to change. The remaining troops were not moved; and
increased attention was given to the development of concessions both in
Manchuria and in Korea. In fact, the changed character of Russian action
seems to have reflected the uncertain balance of influence within the central
government, rather than a firm decision to strengthen the country’s posi-
tion in the Far East. 1 But this was not evident to outsiders. Moreover, in
a region where government was notoriously weak, the dividing line between
the pursuit of economic interest and of political and military domination
was not easy to define. The Japanese saw the situation as one that de-
manded a firm assertion of their own interests.
In June 1903 Japan decided to seek an agreement with Russia regarding
their respective positions in China and Korea. The character of the pro-
posals that were submitted in August was affected not only by the existence
of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance but also by recent changes in Japanese
politics. Although all the survivors of the ‘elder statesmen’ who had
engineered the Meiji restoration of 1868 still occupied positions of in-
fluence within the government, the member of the group who was pre-
dominant at this period, Yamagata Aritomo, was the most authoritarian
and aggressive of their number. He had engineered a change by which
eligibility for appointment as minister for war or for the navy was restricted
to serving officers of high rank; and, by his hostility to political parties,
he had precipitated a decline in the vigour of parliamentary opposition
to the executive. As a result, the Japanese terms for a settlement were
severe ones. Russian recognition of Japan’s ‘preponderant interests’ in
Korea was to be unqualified, while Japan’s reciprocal recognition of
Russian interests in Manchuria was to be limited in ways that would not
preclude the development of the Japanese position there. Negotiations
continued for some months; but by January 1904 both countries realised
that an impasse had been reached and were preparing for war.
Early in February the Japanese broke off diplomatic relations with
Russia, landed troops in Korea, and attacked Russian naval vessels at
Port Arthur, in the leasehold territory of the Liaotung peninsula, in
southern Manchuria. These actions were immediately followed by the
issuing of declarations of war by both Russia and Japan. In the ensuing
fighting Japanese forces occupied the principal Russian centres in Man-
churia and virtually destroyed the Russian Baltic fleet, which had been
sent to the Far East in an attempt to destroy Japanese naval predominance.
1 Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881-1904, pp. 177-249.
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After their resounding naval victory, the Japanese proposed to President
Theodore Roosevelt that he should invite the two powers to meet to discuss
terms of peace. The President agreed to take this initiative; and a peace
conference was held at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August and
September 1905. While it was in progress, Japan’s position was further
strengthened by the publication of a revised Anglo-Japanese treaty, which
extended the scope of the alliance to include the defence of British interests
in India and gave more explicit recognition to Japanese hegemony in
Korea. By the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan gained Russian recognition of
her paramount position in Korea, the transfer to her of the Russian lease-
hold and railway in southern Manchuria (subject to the approval of China,
which was readily given), and the cession of the southern half of the island
of Sakhalin. 1 The terms of the treaty, and the military victory that lay
behind them, confirmed Japan’s position as a major power. But, in the
long run, these developments were of greater importance in another way.
They established Japan as a power with extensive interests on the mainland
of Asia. Moreover, as Japan had hoped for even greater Russian con-
cessions, they left the country — and especially its increasingly influential
military group — with a sense of grievance. The Russo-Japanese war pro-
vided the foundations upon which later Japanese imperialism was based.
During the following years Japan consolidated her position in both
Korea and Manchuria. In relation to Korea, where the interests of the
other powers were small, the problems to be resolved soon became quasi-
domestic ones. In Japan itself there were differences of opinion as to how
full control should be established, and in Korea there was opposition to
Japanese domination; but, once the powers had accepted the implications
of Japanese hegemony, there was little external objection to Japan’s
decisions. In November 1905 Korea became a protectorate: Japan ob-
tained control of the country’s external relations and, in the following
year, appointed a Resident-General at Seoul. In 1907, after the abdica-
tion of the king, Japan assumed control of domestic affairs. In 1910 the
country was annexed. 8
The Japanese position in Manchuria was a more difficult one. A Gover-
nor-General was appointed to the leased territory; and a corporation, in
which half the capital was held by the government, was formed to control the
railway and engage in a wide variety of other functions, including mining.
Japan had obtained further rights from China when seeking agreement
to the transfer of the Russian concessions; and, gradually, co-operation
1 Payson J. Treat, Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Japan, 1895-1905
(Stanford University, 1938), pp. 242-8; Edward H. Zabriskie, American-Russian Rivalry
in the Far East: A Study in Diplomacy and Power Politics, 1895-1914 (Philadelphia, 1946),
pp. 115-30. For the text of the treaty, see MacMurray, Treaties and Agreements, vol. 1,
pp. 522-8.
* Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea: 1868-1910 (Philadelphia, [i960]),
pp. 325-441.
24
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between Japan and Russia in the development of their respective spheres
of influence became closer. Under these conditions, Japanese invest-
ment rapidly increased. But Manchuria, unlike Korea, was a region
of considerable interest to investors in other countries. In particular,
British and American groups concerned with the building of railways
obtained concessions from China that the Japanese considered to be in
contravention of their own special rights. The antagonism generated by
these moves led to nothing more serious for Japan than the reassertion
by America of its ‘ open door’ policy. But even this represented a challenge,
and a potential danger, to Japanese imperialism.
As in the opening years of the century, the weakness of China remained
a major source of trouble. The government, unable to defend the country’s
rights directly, saw advantage in stimulating dissension among those who
sought to increase their encroachments upon them. But, though action
of this kind may have somewhat reduced the scale of foreign investment,
it did not affect the internal forces that were slowly bringing about the
final collapse of the imperial regime.
After the Boxer rising, the autonomy of the provincial governments
became more firmly entrenched. Where there was effective leadership, the
provinces reorganised their local armies, improved communications, pro-
moted industrial development, and established modem schools. Provincial
leaders regarded this work as important not only in itself but also as con-
stituting the only practical defence against foreign domination. Attempts
to restore central control therefore encountered provincial opposition.
The central government was impeded no less, however, by factors that
affected its operation even more directly: lack of finance; an inefficient
and demoralised civil service; and — till her death in 1908 — the baneful
influence of the empress dowager, reactionary, jealous and intriguing.
Partly for these reasons, even the more carefully planned and directed of
government activities failed to achieve the expected results. The formation
of a modem army led to an attack on the position of its organiser and
commander. Yuan Shih-k’ai, by the empress dowager. The establishment
of a constituent assembly, in preparation for the introduction of repre-
sentative government, provided a forum from which its members launched
a comprehensive attack on government policies. The decision to develop
a national railway system precipitated the downfall of the empire itself,
because its implementation both entrenched upon provincial interests and
was to be financed by a foreign loan.
In 19 1 1 an uprising against the central government occurred in the
province of Szechwan, in the Yangtze valley, provoked by the railway
scheme. This provided an opening for men whose political objectives were
far more radical than those of the provincial leaders. In the treaty ports
and overseas, younger Chinese had gained an appreciation of the political
ideology of the West and developed a programme for reorganising China
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as a modem state able, like Japan, to handle its relations with the Western
powers on terms of equality. Under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, they
had formed an organisation, the Tung-meng-hui, to promote the realisa-
tion of their plans. This organisation was in touch, through the secret
societies, with the rural population and, through army officers who had
trained overseas, with the provincial governments. In 191 1 the Tung-meng-
hui was prepared for risings in the provinces of the Yangtze valley. An
explosion in a house at Wuhan where members were making bombs
resulted in a police search that found evidence incriminating local army
officers. These men forced their commander to lead an uprising against
the dynasty. The rebellion quickly spread to other parts of central and
southern China; and, on Sun Yat-sen’s return from an overseas trip in
December, he was elected president of a republican government.
The imperial government reacted to these moves by inviting Yuan Shih-
k’ai to return to its service and lead the northern armies against the rebels.
Yuan quickly achieved military victory; but he used it not to restore the
imperial power but to reach agreement with the revolutionary leaders. In
return for his undertaking to procure the abdication of the Manchu
dynasty, which he accomplished, he was made president of the republican
government, in place of Sun Yat-sen.
The new regime possessed an obvious source of strength, as an alliance
between China’s most experienced military leader and the revolutionary
movement. But its weaknesses were both numerous and prospectively
destructive. Yuan had no alternative to confirming the appointments of
all those who held office at a provincial or regional level at the time of his
own assumption of power. More importantly, his aims and those of the
revolutionaries were markedly divergent; and the latter were seriously
divided among themselves. Yuan was an authoritarian, who saw himself
as the founder of a new dynasty. Sun Yat-sen and his personal supporters
favoured a form of revolutionary totalitarianism. But another section of
the Tung-meng-hui, led by Sung Chiao-jen, wished to see China adopt the
British system of parliamentary government. In pursuit of this objective.
Sung persuaded several other revolutionary groups to join with the Tung-
meng-hui in forming a political party, the Kuomintang. The new govern-
ment was adhering to the intention of its predecessor that an election
should be held and a parliament be constituted in 1913. When it met, the
Kuomintang, which had secured the election of the largest group of
members, sought to obtain a constitution in which executive power would
be vested in a prime minister and cabinet responsible to parliament. This
objective conflicted directly with Yuan Shih-k’ai’s quest for personal
supremacy. Before parliament met, he had arranged the assassination of
Sung Chiao-jen. Now, he declared the Kuomintang illegal and dissolved
parliament.
Superficially, Yuan Shih-k’ai was well on the way towards the satis-
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faction of his ambition. In addition to destroying overt political opposi-
tion, he had obtained financial assistance from the powers. He proceeded
to have a constitution drafted which concentrated authority in the hands
of the president, and he had himself elected to this office for life. But, at a
deeper level, most of the basic sources of weakness remained. The revolu-
tionary movement still continued to work for a modernised China. The
provinces still opposed the authority of Peking. The powers and their
nationals still retained the privileges that had cut so deeply into Chinese
autonomy. China had gained a new regime, but it still lacked a viable
system of government.
The first world war, and the subsequent peace settlement, profoundly
changed the political situation in the Far East and had a significant, though
much more limited, effect upon the islands to the south. These changes
were a product of the war as a whole. Military operations in the Pacific
region were both restricted in scope and confined in time to the opening
and closing stages of the war. They affected the eventual bargaining power
of certain of the victors on particular issues; but, in relation to the more
far-reaching changes that the war brought about, they were of minor
importance.
The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 at once directly involved
the Far East and the Pacific. Four of the original belligerents, Britain,
France, Russia and Germany, were powers with major interests in China;
and they were soon joined by Japan, as the ally of Britain. In addition,
most of the island territories of the Pacific were dependencies of Britain,
France or Germany, and Australia, New Zealand and Canada were
British Dominions.
The centre of German military power in the Pacific was at Tsingtao, in
the leased territory of Kiaochow, in Shangtung. Here a strongly fortified
naval base had been built and the East Asia Squadron was stationed. The
German island territories had few fortifications, but they possessed power-
ful radio stations able to maintain contact with naval vessels at sea. At the
beginning of the war, most of the larger ships of the squadron were cruising
in the Pacific and thus ready to attempt the disruption of enemy shipping
and communications. The initial tasks of the Allies were therefore those of
protecting shipping and of occupying the German island territories, in
order to silence their radio stations.
In the early months of the war, the German navy inflicted sporadic
damage on Allied shipping in the Pacific ; but it was hampered by the lack
of an adequate base other than Tsingtao, which was soon under attack
by the Japanese. By the end of 19 1 4 all the vessels of the East Asia Squadron
had either been destroyed or driven into neutral ports by lack of coal.
The German colonies were taken with little opposition. A New Zealand
expeditionary force, supported by vessels of the Australian and French
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navies, reached German Samoa at the end of August. The governor
declined to surrender the territory to the Allied force, but he refrained
from ordering that it should be opposed. Rabaul, the capital of German
New Guinea, was occupied by an Australian force in September, without
serious resistance, and the other ports in the New Guinea area later in the
year. The isolated island of Nauru, important for its phosphate deposits,
was taken by an Australian cruiser on its way to New Guinea. The occupa-
tion of the Marianas and the Caroline and Marshall Islands, which were
also administered from Rabaul, presented no greater military hazards;
but it raised important questions of Allied strategy.
When the Japanese government had offered the country’s services to
Britain, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had been reluctant to
encourage full-scale participation by Japan in the war. On the other hand,
Britain stood in need of naval assistance in the Pacific. The British Ambas-
sador at Tokyo therefore presented a formal request ‘that the Japanese
fleet should, if possible, hunt out and destroy the armed German merchant
cruisers who are now attacking our commerce’. 1 It was hoped that this
formula would restrict Japanese participation to naval action in the China
seas. But Japan’s ultimatum to Germany ignored the suggested limitation.
When Japan declared war, after Germany’s failure to comply with
the terms of the ultimatum, it thus became necessary for Britain and
Japan to determine the fields of operation of their naval forces. The
agreement that was reached provided that the Japanese should patrol the
waters north of the equator and the Royal Australian Navy those south
of it.
The Marianas, Carolines and Marshalls lay within the area for which
Japan had assumed patrolling responsibilities; but it had always been
understood that their occupation would be carried out by the Australians.
No expeditionary force had been dispatched, however, at the time of the
Anglo-Japanese agreement. The Japanese therefore occupied the island
of Yap, in the Carolines, where one of the German radio stations was
situated, and explained that they were willing to transfer control to the
Australians in due course. When an Australian force was about to sail for
the German islands, however, rioting occurred in Tokyo in protest against
the proposed transfer. Japan thereupon requested British agreement to her
remaining in the islands. The request was accepted ; and, on 3 December,
the British government informed Australia that ‘we consider it most con-
venient for strategic reasons to allow them to remain in occupation for the
present leaving [the] whole question of [the] future [of the islands] to be
settled at the end of [the] war’. 2
1 Quoted in A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (New
York, 1938), p. 181.
* Quoted in S. S. Mackenzie, The Australians at Rabaul: The Capture and Administration
of the German Possessions in the Southern Pacific (4th ed. Sydney, 1937), p. 160.
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This manoeuvre, despite its apparent — though perhaps calculated —
artlessness, was consistent with other aspects of Japanese policy. On the
outbreak of war the governments of the United States and China had
tried to secure agreement to the maintenance of the status quo in the Far
East. But, in her ultimatum to Germany, Japan had demanded the transfer
to her of the German leasehold at Kiaochow. She had accepted a British
request for the inclusion of the words ‘ with a view to eventual restoration
of the same to China’; and the Prime Minister, Okuma Shigenobu, had
assured the world ‘that Japan has no ulterior motive, no desire to secure
more territory, no thought of depriving China or other peoples of any-
thing which they now possess But, on the issue of immediate occupation,
the Japanese had stood firm.
Kiaochow was, indeed, of great importance to Japan. From the naval
base of Tsingtao, a railway had been built, with German capital, running
inland to Tsinan, and mining rights and other privileges had been acquired
in the country thus opened up. These developments had turned Shantung
into a German sphere of interest. As soon as Japan entered the war, she
sent a naval force to invest Tsingtao and landed troops, supported by a
small British force, in northern Shantung. Tsingtao fell on io November;
and Japan then set up a military administration to control both the lease-
hold and the railway.
The government of China had sought to resolve its own problems in
relation to the Allied landing by proclaiming a war zone within which it
disclaimed responsibility for the actions of the belligerents; but neither
side had accepted the definition of the zone. When Japan established a
military administration, China protested. On 7 January 1915 it cancelled
the war zone and demanded withdrawal of the Japanese forces, return of
the leased territory, and payment of damages for operations outside the
leasehold area. The government of Japan retaliated by accusing the
Chinese of acting with ‘want of confidence in international good faith and
regardless of friendly relations ’ and by seeking a settlement of what were
described as ‘outstanding questions between Japan and China’. 2 On
18 January it presented the President of China, Yuan Shih-k’ai, with its
Twenty-one Demands.
The dispute over the occupation of Kiaochow provided the occasion
for, rather than the cause of, the Japanese demarche. Japan had been em-
bittered by the action of Russia, France and Germany in 1895, when they
had compelled her to abandon some of her demands upon China, and by
the influence of the Western powers ten years later in causing her to
moderate her claims upon Russia. Now, it seemed that she could greatly
strengthen her bargaining position at the eventual peace conference by
1 H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (6 vols. London,
1920-4), vol. vi, p. 373-
! T. E. La Fargue, China and the World War (Stanford University, 1937), p. 27.
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reaching a bilateral agreement with China while the other powers were
occupied with the war.
The demands were arranged in five groups. 1 Group One dealt with
Shantung, where Japan hoped to build up her position along the lines
she had followed earlier in southern Manchuria. The Chinese government
was required to ‘ give full assent ’ to any agreement Japan might later make
with Germany regarding the Kiaochow leasehold and other German
rights. It was required not to alienate land ‘to any other Power’; but, on
the other hand, it was to agree to the building of an additional railway by
the Japanese. And, finally, certain towns were to be thrown open to foreign
residence and trade. The demands in Group Two were concerned with
southern Manchuria and the adjacent region of eastern Inner Mongolia.
China was to recognise ‘the predominant position of Japan’ in both
regions and to grant a number of concessions. The most important of the
latter were: an extension for ‘a further period of 99 years’ of the lease of
Port Arthur and Dairen and control of the South Manchuria and Antung-
Mukden Railways; the grant of complete freedom to Japanese subjects to
reside, acquire land, and carry on business in all parts of the two regions ;
and the acceptance of an obligation to consult Japan about any proposal
involving the use of foreign capital or foreign experts. In Groups Three
and Four, respectively, Japan demanded that the Hanyehp’ing iron and
steel company should become a joint Sino-Japanese enterprise and that
China should not ‘cede or lease to any other Power any harbour or bay
on or any island along the coast of China’. The wider ambitions of the
Japanese were revealed most clearly of all by the demands in Group Five.
These included provisions requiring China to employ Japanese as political,
military and financial advisers, to place the police (‘in localities. . .where
such arrangements are necessary ’) under joint Sino-Japanese control, and
either to purchase arms from Japan or to establish an arsenal under joint
Sino-Japanese management. The full acceptance of the Twenty-one De-
mands would have reduced China to the status of a Japanese dependency.
In presenting the demands, the Japanese minister at Peking had en-
joined secrecy upon the government of China. The latter realised, however,
that only by allowing their contents to leak out could opposition to them
be stimulated. Negotiations between the two governments therefore took
place against a background of critical comment — not only in China and
among the Western powers, but even in Japan itself. Moreover, Britain,
as Japan’s ally, had formally urged moderation. As a result, Japan dropped
some of the proposals and withheld those in Group Five ‘ for later negotia-
tion’. But she held to her demands for an extension of her leasehold and
railway rights in southern Manchuria and for the final elimination of
Germany from Shantung. After virtual agreement had been reached on
1 Quotations from the text of the demands are from the Japanese translation. This is
printed in full ibid, appendix 1, pp. 241-3.
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these terms, the Chinese government continued to prolong the discussions.
The treaties, which the government knew would greatly damage its stand-
ing in China, were not signed till Japan issued an ultimatum.
The government of Yuan Shih-k’ai had suffered from the war in other
ways than by its diplomatic capitulation to the Japanese. The financial aid
that it had earlier received from the Western powers was not continued,
nor were the funds of private investors in Western countries any longer
available for development projects in China. When Yuan began to take
steps to establish a monarchy, with himself as emperor, the military
governors of the provinces rose against him. In concert with the party
groups of the former parliament, they were discussing means of forcing
his retirement from the presidency when he died on 6 June 1916.
After the death of Yuan Shih-k’ai, China soon relapsed again into
political disorder. The former parliament was recalled; and the constitu-
tion that it had drafted, providing for an executive responsible to it, was
brought into force. Since parliament was dominated by the Kuomintang
and its allies, this arrangement did not resolve the fundamental conflict
between the revolutionary movement and the military. A temporary com-
promise was achieved: Li Huan-hung, the former Vice-President and a
supporter of parliament, became President; and Tuan Ch’i-jui, a northern
military leader, became Prime Minister. But the old conflict soon re-
emerged, in relation, first, to provincial government (where the constitu-
tion could not be applied) and, then, to foreign policy.
When Germany, on 31 January 1917, announced her intention to resort
to unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States decided to break off
diplomatic relations with her and to urge all other neutral countries to
take similar action. The American approach to China caused the Allies to
reconsider their own attitudes, which had previously been in favour of
Chinese neutrality. Japan decided to encourage China to join the Allies
as soon as possible. The Japanese government shared the general belief
that America’s severance of relations with Germany would be followed
before long by a declaration of war. It was thus anxious to avoid a situa-
tion in which China entered the war as a protege of the United States,
since this would be likely to lead to strong American support for China
when the subject-matter of the Twenty-one Demands was considered by
the peace conference. For different reasons, Britain and France also
reached the conclusion that an early declaration of war by China was
desirable. The Allies therefore outlined to China the advantages, primarily
in terms of loans and concessions, that she could expect to obtain by
joining them.
These two approaches — by America and by the Allies — were assessed
by Chinese political leaders largely in relation to the domestic situation.
Tuan Ch’i-jui quickly gave his support to the severance of diplomatic
relations, since he hoped it would enable him to obtain financial assistance
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and thus reduce his dependence on parliament. For similar reasons, he
came, a little later, to favour a declaration of war. Parliament, aware of
his thinking, initially had reservations about the desirability of even the
first of these moves ; but it was won over by the prospect of aid. And on
14 March, after a favourable vote in parliament, China broke off diplo-
matic relations with Germany. Parliament’s doubts regarding entry into
the war were, however, more serious and more lasting. The economic and
military arguments for doing so seemed of dubious validity: the Allies
might not provide the financial assistance of which their representatives
had spoken; and — after the outbreak of revolution in Russia — their victory
appeared uncertain. But parliament was concerned, above all, with the
increased power that a declaration of war would give to the military. This
concern was greatly intensified when a conference of military governors,
convened by Tuan, gave support to his war policy and when a hired mob
attempted the direct intimidation of members of parliament.
These last events brought about the collapse of the uneasy alliance
between parliament and the military. After the fall, successively, of the
Prime Minister, parliament and the President, and a brief interlude during
which a military leader attempted to restore the Manchu dynasty, Tuan
Ch’i-jui returned to office as the head of a military government. In August
1917 this government declared war on Germany. A month later an alterna-
tive ‘provisional government’ in Canton, which had been set up by the
Kuomintang members of the former parliament, recognised the action
that had been taken. China was thus committed as fully as its chaotic
political situation allowed to participation in the war.
The results of China’s belligerency were, on the whole, disappointing
both to the Chinese and to the Allies. China gained several useful con-
cessions from Britain, France and the United States (which had entered
the war in April), but no major financial assistance. The Allies received
little help from China in the conduct of the war. Japan, continuing to
pursue the path of self-interest, emerged as the principal beneficiary. In
return for loans to the Peking government, it obtained further concessions
and substantial control over Chinese military affairs.
During the latter half of 1 9 1 7, the Japanese government was also attempt-
ing to win the support of the United States for its claims in China. Like
the other Allied powers, Japan sent a war mission to Washington. While
its ostensible purpose was the co-ordination of immediate war-time activi-
ties, the main objective of its leader, Ishii Kikujiro, was American recogni-
tion of Japan’s ‘ paramount interest’ in China. The American Secretary of
State, Robert Lansing, at first countered Ishii’s suggestion by proposing
a Japanese-American declaration affirming respect for the ‘open door’
policy and the territorial integrity of China. Eventually a compromise
was reached and embodied in the Lansing-Ishii Agreement of 2 November.
In this document the United States accepted the argument ‘ that territorial
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propinquity creates special relations between countries, and, consequently,
the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special
interests in China, particularly in the part to which her possessions are
contiguous’. The Japanese government, on the other hand, reaffirmed that
it would ‘ always adhere to the principle of the so-called “ open door” ’ and
denied that it had any intention ‘to infringe in any way the independence
or territorial integrity of China’. 1 The wording of the agreement was not
without ambiguity; and it was differently interpreted by its two signa-
tories. To Ishii, it marked American recognition of Japan’s position in
southern Manchuria and acquiescence in the advancement of a type of
Japanese ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for the Far East. To Lansing, on the other
hand, Japan’s ‘special interests’ had been recognised only in a geographi-
cal, and not a political, sense. Ishii probably had the better of the argu-
ment; but, in any event, he had secured American acceptance of a
document that was likely to be useful to Japan — and embarrassing to
America — in later negotiations.
Within a few days of the signing of the Lansing-Ishii Agreement,
another event occurred to complicate further the Far Eastern situation.
The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. For the Allies, this had two
important consequences: Russian co-operation with them was at an end;
and, if the new government should survive, a separate peace would
probably be made with Germany. While they were considering the military
implications of the situation, a crisis arose in northern Manchuria. In the
railway zone the Russian imperial government had gradually assumed
complete administrative control, so that centres like Harbin were ruled
as though they were Russian colonies. At this time Bolshevik supporters
attempted to bring the administrator of the zone under their control. On
behalf of the Allies, Chinese troops were sent to the area and successfully
restored his authority.
The Allied action made the railway zone a centre for Russian anti-
Bolshevik plotting. In the spring of 1918 a Russian irregular force moved
across the frontier into Siberia; but, after its defeat in June by the Red
Army, it retreated again into Manchuria. This event gave rise to fears,
real or simulated, of an imminent Russian invasion and led to the dispatch
of a Japanese force to the area. Meanwhile, the Allies had been discussing
the landing of troops at Vladivostok to co-operate with anti-Soviet groups.
Some of the principal arguments used in relation to this project were either
unsound or disingenuous. It was contended that it might relieve pressure
on the western front — by releasing 50,000 Czech troops who were march-
ing east to offer their services to the Allies — and that it might facilitate the
formation of an anti-Bolshevik government in Siberia. In reality, the
thinking of the Allies was affected not only by considerations of this sort
1 The text of the agreement is printed in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1917, pp. 264-5.
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but also by their suspicions of one another. The Japanese feared that the
Americans intended to seek concessions in Siberia from the Soviet govern-
ment; and this increased their determination to give military support to
the anti-Bolshevik groups already operating in the region. The Americans
feared that the Japanese were planning yet another expansionist move,
which made them unwilling to permit the latter to act alone. On these
various grounds, a decision was taken in favour of Allied intervention;
and in August and September 1918 Japanese, American, British and
French forces were landed at Vladivostok. 1
When the Allied powers signed an armistice with Germany on
11 November 1918, the world war came to an end; but in Siberia, as on
the other borders of Russia, Allied military activity continued. It was not
abandoned till all prospect of successful Russian opposition to the Com-
munist regime had finally disappeared and till Japan had lost any chance
of making territorial gains.
The situation in the Pacific at the end of the war differed very sub-
stantially from that which had existed at its beginning. Japan had ex-
tended her influence in Manchuria, taken over the German leasehold and
other concessions in Shantung, and occupied the German Pacific islands
north of the equator. Australia and New Zealand had occupied the Ger-
man islands in the South Pacific. And the principal Allied powers and
their satellites had made agreements with one another during the course
of the war, some open and some secret, as to the benefits they should
receive when they met in conference as victors. Russia had temporarily
lost her influence as a Pacific power, as a result of the revolution, and
Germany had lost her colonies and concessions through military defeat.
These were the changes that would largely determine Allied decisions
during the peace settlement.
But there had also been changes of a rather different order, less relevant
to the substance of immediate negotiations but of greater importance in
relation to the future balance of power and influence in the Pacific region.
Both France and Britain had been weakened by the war, so that the former
had lost the capacity to play a major role in the politics of the Far East
and the latter the resources needed to restore its former naval predomi-
nance. Japan and the United States, on the other hand, had emerged from
the war in far stronger positions than they had had when it began. Both
countries were in a period of rapid economic growth; and, in both, the
war had produced a sharpened awareness of the implications for internal
security and prosperity of securing a settlement of international issues
satisfactory to themselves. Russia was now controlled by a regime which,
although it rejected the techniques and objectives of imperialism, was
determined to establish its influence in China for ideological reasons. In
1 On this episode, see James William Morley, The Japanese Thrust into Siberia, 1918
(New York, 1957).
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Chinaitself changewas less explicit. The old war-lords, who had exchanged
the service of the empire for the pursuit of personal power, were still
politically dominant ; but they were served by men of a younger generation,
often educated abroad, who were capable of reorganising administration
at home or representing their country in foreign affairs on modem lines.
And the government at Canton, inefficient and lacking in military resources
as it was, none the less represented a broad-based national movement for
political modernisation. The emergence of China as a modem state, though
it had not yet occurred, was at least foreseeable. These were the changes
against which the decisions reached during the peace settlement would
be tested.
At the Peace Conference, which opened in Paris in January 1919, three
of the matters that were discussed were of predominant concern to the
Pacific: the disposition of the German Pacific islands; the settlement of
the problem of Shantung; and a proposal by Japan for the inclusion in
the Covenant of the League of Nations of a clause guaranteeing racial
equality. In relation to the first two of these, the freedom of action of the
conference was limited by secret agreements made during the course of
the war. Early in 1917, when German submarine attacks were placing
a great strain on Allied shipping, Britain had asked Japan to send
destroyers to the Mediterranean. The request had been accepted in return
for an undertaking by Britain to support Japanese claims to the German
islands north of the equator and to the German concessions in Shantung.
Japan, on her part, had agreed to support British claims to the islands
which had been occupied by the Australians and New Zealanders. 1 The
agreement had been reluctantly acquiesced in by the governments of
Australia and New Zealand; and, shortly afterwards, France and Italy
had entered into similar undertakings.
The problems facing the conference in regard to the German Pacific
islands did not therefore include the choice of an administering authority
but related only to the terms under which its powers should be exercised.
President Wilson of the United States attached great importance to the
principle of international trusteeship for ex-enemy territories unready for
self-government; and this principle underlay the mandates provisions that
were being incorporated in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Japan,
on the other hand, claimed unfettered control over the Micronesian
islands. Australia and New Zealand, which were to exercise the rights of
the British crown in the former German territories in Samoa and New
Guinea respectively, and to be associated with Britain in Nauru, adopted
a similar line (as did South Africa in relation to the former German terri-
tory of South West Africa). In particular, they demanded the right to
impose restrictions on trade and immigration. To resolve this impasse,
1 H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, vol. vi, pp. 634-7.
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a new class of mandate — known as Class C — was provided for in the
Covenant. ‘There are territories, such as South West Africa and certain
of the South Pacific Islands’, the Covenant declared, ‘which, owing to the
sparseness of their population, or their small size, or their geographical
contiguity to the territory of the Mandatory, and other circumstances,
can best be administered under the laws of the Mandatory as integral
portions of its territory . . . ’ By the use of this formula, the claimants were
given the power to impose the restrictions they desired — which were already
part of their own law. They were limited only by a general ban on fortifica-
tion of mandated territories and by an obligation to protect the interests
of the indigenous inhabitants. The compromise satisfied neither Wilson
nor the prospective mandatories, but it was accepted, reluctantly, by both.
On the question of Shantung, unlike that of the Pacific islands, the
Japanese had built up so strong a case for their claims that they were able
to avoid the need for compromise. Apart from the promises of support
that they had been given by Britain, France and Italy in 1917, they had
obtained the formal agreement of China. In 1915, after the presentation
of the Twenty-one Demands, the government of China had undertaken
to accept any agreement that might be reached between Japan and Ger-
many. In September 1918 it had agreed that the former German railway
should become a joint Sino-Japanese concern and that Japan should
finance the building of two important branch lines. Moreover, the Japanese
contended that the United States had recognised their country’s special
interest in Shantung in the Lansing-Ishii Agreement. On the basis of these
agreements, Japan demanded that the Kiaochow leasehold and the other
German concessions should be handed over to her. The leasehold would
eventually be restored to China. Only the economic concessions would be
retained, and these would be dealt with in accordance with the existing
Sino-Japanese agreement.
Despite the earlier commitments by the Peking government, the Chinese
delegation at the conference passionately opposed the Japanese demand.
Though its nominal leader, the Chinese Foreign Minister, was a politician
of the old school, its dominant members were men of a younger generation
who had received a Western education in China and later graduated from
overseas universities. These men, like others of the retumed-student group,
were determined to work for the removal of the restrictions placed by the
powers upon the exercise of China’s sovereignty. As a consequence of the
weakness and disorganisation of the government in Peking, they seem to
have possessed a quite unusual freedom to develop their own lines of
action in Paris. In addition, however, the Peking government was engaged,
during the critical months of the conference, in trying to reach agreement
with the provisional government in Canton on the restoration of unity in
China. The forceful arguments of Chinese spokesmen in Paris were
probably seen as helpful to this endeavour, both by diverting attention
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from critical discussions at home and by emphasising the government’s
vigorous defence of the country’s interests.
The Chinese case, which was presented by V. K. Wellington Koo, was
a mixture of legal argument and appeal to sentiment. Wellington Koo
claimed that the German lease had been obtained by force and that the
1915 treaty with Japan had been signed by China under duress. Moreover,
China had abrogated all treaties with Germany when she entered the war,
so that the latter possessed no rights which could be ceded to Japan. But
he also emphasized the position of Shantung as an integral part of China, a
region of great current importance but also ‘ the cradle of Chinese civiliza-
tion, the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, and a Holy Land for the
Chinese’. 1 On these grounds, he demanded the direct return to China of
all rights in Shantung possessed by Germany at the outbreak of war.
The Chinese case, and the skill with which it was presented, received
much favourable publicity in the world’s press and aroused great en-
thusiasm among the western-educated group in China. As a result, the
delegation increased its demands when the subject came up for final
settlement. It asked for the abrogation not only of the 1915 treaty regard-
ing Shantung but for that of all the treaties and agreements of 1915 and
1918, including those relating to Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. It had
failed fully to understand the distinction between a debating success and
the manoeuvres of power politics. Japan’s demands were accepted in toto.
But before Japan attained this victory she had been defeated on the
third major issue of importance to her. In the League of Nations Com-
mission, which was drafting the Covenant, the Japanese representative
had moved for the insertion of a clause guaranteeing racial equality: ‘The
equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the
High Contracting Powers agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien
nationals of States members of the League equal and just treatment in
every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account
of their race or nationality.’ 2 The subject was of great significance to
Japan — and to other non-western nations — on grounds of prestige. But
it was also of practical importance in relation to migration. For the latter
reason, the Japanese draft was intensely disliked by the representatives of
countries, such as the British dominions, which imposed restrictions on the
entry of non-Europeans. Successive amendments to it by the Japanese,
reducing it to a simple affirmation of the principle of racial equality, failed
to mollify, in particular, the Prime Minister of Australia, William Morris
Hughes, who threatened to arouse popular opposition in the dominions
and the western states of America. In these circumstances, both President
Wilson and the British representative on the commission abstained from
1 The words are those of the official record of proceedings (quoted in La Fargue, China
and the World War, p. 198).
2 David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant (2 vols. New York, 1928), vol. 1,
p. 183.
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voting when the amended Japanese motion was put. When eleven out of
seventeen votes were cast in its favour, Wilson declared that unanimity
was necessary for it to be passed.
The decisions of the Peace Conference thus tended to confirm existing
attitudes in both Japan and China. The Japanese delegation had gained
its objectives when it had been able to rely on firm undertakings entered
into during the course of the war; but it had failed when it was primarily
dependent upon the goodwill of the Western powers. The benefits that had
been obtained by China were little more than inevitable corollaries of the
terms of reference of the conference itself. The war-time abrogation of
treaties between China and both Germany and Austria-Hungary had been
declared permanent. And the Chinese delegation, through its presence
at the conference, had been able to create an awareness of the need for a
general revision of the country’s treaty relations with the powers. But no
positive action had been taken towards China’s emergence as a member
of the family of nations. More generally, the atmosphere of the conference
and the tone of public discussion in western countries had re-emphasised
the division between East and West. Even Japan, although she was of
necessity accepted as a great power, remained, in Western eyes, a part of
Asia. Despite the formation of the League of Nations, the heritage of five
centuries of European expansion still precluded the creation of an un-
divided world community.
For these reasons, amongst others, the world situation remained a
troubled one; and, during the years immediately following the war,
Britain, the United States and Japan all embarked on massive programmes
of naval construction. The expenditure that these programmes entailed
both hampered the economic development of the three countries and
created financial difficulties for their governments. The increase in naval
armaments resulting from them merely exacerbated the sense of insecurity
that had given them birth.
One of the main sources of international tension was the situation in the
Far East. The American and Japanese governments continued to regard
each other’s policy towards China with intense suspicion. From the
American point of view, the position was complicated by the existence
of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. This had always tended, the Americans
considered, to make Britain tolerant of Japanese claims and was still more
likely to do so in future, since Britain had lost her former naval predomi-
nance in the Pacific. The alliance was due to expire in July 1921. Would it
be renewed and, if so, on what terms? This was a question of importance
not only to the two signatory powers but also to the United States, the
British Dominions and China.
During the early months of 1921, the British and American govern-
ments made their positions clearer to one another on the two major issues
— the limitation of armaments and the future of the Anglo-Japanese
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alliance. By June the British government knew that the United States
favoured the calling of a disarmament conference and desired that the
alliance should be either abandoned or substantially modified. The
American government, on its part, knew that Britain accepted the prin-
ciple of naval parity with the United States and was willing to revise,
though not to abandon, the alliance. It thus remained for the two powers
to find a way of resolving the differences that still existed between them
(and with other interested parties) and of giving effect to their eventual
conclusions.
At the Imperial Conference which assembled in London in the second
half of June, the Canadian Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen, assumed the
role of mediator between Washington and London. He suggested, and his
fellow Prime Ministers agreed, that there should be a conference on Pacific
and Far Eastern problems between Britain, the United States, Japan and
China . 1 This proposal became known to the American government in
advance of its formal communication. In order to retain the initiative,
it immediately invited the governments of Britain, Japan, France and Italy
to attend a conference at Washington on the limitation of armaments.
When the British proposal was officially received, the Americans suggested
that the scope and, so far as necessary, the membership of the conference
should be widened, so as to include Pacific and Far Eastern questions. And
to this procedure the British government agreed.
Of the powers originally invited by the Americans, only Japan had
reservations about accepting. The Japanese government was not unwilling
to enter into discussions on the limitation of armaments. But it was
suspicious of American motives in proposing the inclusion of Pacific and
Far Eastern questions. Was not this an attempt to force the abandonment
of the Anglo-Japanese alliance? Did not America hope to undermine the
Japanese position in China in her own interests? The Japanese accepted
the invitation but added the comment that they preferred ‘to look forward
to the future ’ rather than to engage in the re-examination of old grievances . 2
In addition to those on the original American list, four countries re-
ceived, and accepted, invitations to attend the widened conference: China,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal. These four were to be excluded
from the discussions on the limitation of armaments but to participate in
those relating to the Far East and the Pacific.
The Washington Conference was opened by President Harding on
12 November. The American Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes,
was elected chairman. Hughes plunged at once into the main business of
the conference by presenting specific proposals for the immediate reduction
and subsequent limitation of the tonnage of capital ships. These proposals
1 On this incident, see J. Bartlet Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the
Washington Conference’, Political Science Quarterly , vol. l , no. i, pp. 45-58.
* Senate Documents, 67th Congress, 2nd session, no. 126, p. 755.
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involved extensive scrapping of existing ships and acceptance of a ten-year
naval holiday. The tonnage of capital ships possessed by the United States,
Britain and Japan would be reduced by 40 per cent and then be limited to
a maximum of 500,000 tons for the United States and Britain and to
300,000 tons for Japan.
Both Britain and Japan accepted the proposals in principle, but attached
reservations. The most important were those of Japan. On the question of
tonnage, agreement was finally reached on a slightly revised formula which
allowed maxima of 525,000 tons to the United States and Britain, 315,000
tons to Japan, and 175,000 tons to the two smaller naval powers, France
and Italy. But, in agreeing to this formula, the Japanese had insisted on
the satisfaction of a further demand. They required that a halt should be
called to the construction of naval bases and fortifications in the Pacific.
This condition was eventually defined so as to exclude the metropolitan
territories of the signatories (including the British Dominions, which were
represented in the British delegation) and certain other areas (notably
Hawaii) ; but it was to apply, most significantly, to the Philippines, Guam
and Hong Kong. 1 The effect thus was to insure the Japanese mainland
against naval attack from any possible base within convenient operational
distance.
Concurrently with the naval discussions, the conference was considering
the Pacific and Far Eastern questions that were before it. Most intimately
connected with the naval problem was that of the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
In view of the strength of American objections to it, the leader of the
British delegation, A. J. Balfour, at first proposed its replacement by a
treaty between Britain, Japan and the United States. But this was un-
acceptable to Hughes, who suggested the inclusion of France, in order
to remove the danger of America’s being outvoted by the combination of
Britain and Japan. On American insistence, the new Four-Power Treaty
was much weaker than the old alliance. It merely pledged the four powers
to respect each other’s rights in their ‘insular possessions and insular
dominions jn the region of the Pacific Ocean’. If a controversy should
arise between any of them on ‘any Pacific question’, there would be a
joint conference; and, if any of them should, in respect of similar ques-
tions, be ‘threatened by the aggressive action of any other Power’, they
would consult together. 2 In the event, even these consultative provisions
were never invoked. The Four-Power Treaty became, as the Americans
1 For the text of the treaties and agreements signed at Washington, and for a record of
the proceedings of the conference, see Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1922, vol. 1, pp. 1-384. For British papers relating to the conference and its back-
ground, see Rohan Butler and J. P. T. Bury (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy,
1919-1939, First Series, vol. xiv: Far Eastern Affairs, April 1920-February 1922 (London,
1966).
* Ibid. p. 35. On the drafting of this treaty, see J. Chal Vinson, ‘ The Drafting of the Four-
Power Treaty of the Washington Conference’, Journal of Modern History, vol. xxv, no. 1,
pp. 40-7.
25
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intended and the Japanese feared, little more than a diplomatic device to
end the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
The most important of the other regional questions were those relating
to the position of China. On matters of general principle, the nine powers
at the conference signed a treaty closely in line with the requests of the
Chinese spokesman. They bound themselves to respect ‘the sovereignty,
independence and integrity of China’, to provide ‘the fullest and most
unembarrassed opportunity’ to China to establish a stable government,
to maintain the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce of all
nations, and to refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China for
the purpose of seeking special rights or privileges. However, the procedure
for the enforcement of these undertakings was limited to a ‘full and frank
communication between the contracting Powers ’ whenever, in the opinion
of any one of them, ‘a situation arose which involved the application of
the Treaty’. The conference was thus happy to express liberal sentiments,
in vague general terms, but cautious in committing itself to specific action
in support of them.
The latter aspect of their thinking emerged dearly in the discussion of
the Chinese government’s points of grievance, such as the foreign control
of customs tariffs, the existence of foreign leaseholds, and extra-terri-
toriality. In respect of customs matters, the powers signed a treaty per-
mitting China to impose significantly higher, though still limited, rates of
duty; and a commission was set up to reform the tariff administration.
Another commission was formed to investigate the working of extra-
territorial rights, with a view to their future abolition, if possible. And
other minor concessions were granted in relation to postal and radio
services.
Among the most important of China’s grievances were those concerning
the position of Japan. These included the problem of Shantung. The
Chinese government was anxious that the conditions for the return of the
Kiaochow leasehold should be discussed, since it wanted to have the
support of the other powers during the negotiations. But the Japanese
were unwilling to have their own bargaining position weakened in this
way. As the subject was too important to be left, the parties eventually
agreed to a compromise by which discussions took place outside the con-
ference, but with Hughes and Balfour present as observers. By the terms
of the settlement which was eventually reached, Japan agreed to restore
full sovereignty to China, together with the ownership of former German
public properties. China, for her part, agreed to purchase the railways with
money borrowed from Japanese bankers and to recognise certain Japanese
interests in the mines. Japan further undertook to withdraw her troops and
China to open the territory to foreign trade . 1 When this agreement was
1 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1922, vol. 1,
pp. 948-60.
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announced, Britain offered to surrender her lease of Weihaiwei, in order
to restore to China full control over the whole of Shantung.
The Chinese also asked that the conference should review the Twenty-
one Demands and Japan’s special interests that were based upon them.
Since the substance of some of the demands had already been disposed of,
and since those in Group Five were now withdrawn by Japan, the major
matters remaining for discussion were those relating to Japanese interests
in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. In regard to these,
the Japanese made two nominal concessions. They agreed to throw open
to an international consortium their option over railway loans; and they
disavowed their intention to insist on the appointment of Japanese as
advisers in the administration of southern Manchuria. They insisted,
however, on retaining their full rights in the Kwantung leasehold and the
Southern Manchuria Railway. Southern Manchuria and Inner Mongolia
were of steadily increasing importance to the economies of Japan and
Korea ; and the retention of control over the communications systems of
the area had become a major object of Japanese policy.
During the three months over which it extended — from November 1921
till February 1922 — the Washington Conference thus surveyed a vast range
of problems; it analysed them in great detail; and it took firm decisions
in respect of them. It thus brought clarity and precision into a wide range
of international relationships in which doubt and uncertainty had ruled
before; and, by doing so, it increased the prospects of future peace. But
this was the real core of its achievement.
At the time, the conference was differently evaluated. Hughes described
the naval treaty as ‘ perhaps the greatest forward step in history to establish
the reign of peace’. 1 And Takahashi Korekiyo, the Japanese Prime
Minister, described the decisions of the conference as ‘a blessing to all
mankind’. 2 These enthusiastic judgements were echoed by the world press
at the time, and by men of affairs throughout the 1920s. But, in reality,
the preservation of the peace required more than the formalising of existing
relationships ; and the diplomatic history of the following decade was, in
part, a record of the collapse of the ‘Washington system’.
The emergence of Japan as a great power had been made possible by the
expansion of her economy. Though the scale of Japanese success in inter-
national politics was substantially increased by the high quality of her
civil and military services, and by the skill and ruthless determination of
her leaders, it had its basis in the facts of economic growth.
Between 1900 and the beginning of the great depression at the end of the
’twenties, total output in Japan is estimated to have grown at an annual
rate of 4-2 per cent. 3 Since population increased from forty-four million to
1 M. J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (2 vols. New York, 1952), vol. n, p. 490.
2 Ibid. p. 508.
’ K. Ohkawa, The Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy since 1878 (Tokyo, 1957), p. 248.
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sixty-four million, at a rate of i -2 per cent per annum, output per head thus
expanded by 3 per cent annually, a rate which was probably unequalled
elsewhere. The rewards of economic growth were by no means shared
equally, but it is clear that very substantial benefits were felt throughout
the population as a whole. Growth was based in the main on a transforma-
tion of the industrial structure as Japan moved closer to a modem Western
pattern. This pattern had been by no means achieved by 1930, but the
modem sector was by then firmly established. Almost half of the gainfully
employed still worked in agriculture, an industry in which there was little
change from the system of small farms and where some half of the farmers
were tenants. Rice was still the main food crop, occupying well over half
the cultivated area. In the production of raw silk, the second most impor-
tant agricultural product, there had been a great expansion, so that by
1929 about two-fifths of all farming families were engaged in cocoon
production as a secondary occupation. Manufacturing industry had ex-
panded substantially and in 1929 employed 17 per cent of the occupied
population but produced 27 per cent of total output. The most spectacular
development was in silk and cotton, in which there was now little evidence
of traditional methods and organisation. As a whole, the textile industry
by then accounted for some 25 per cent of the industrial workers, and as
many as half of those in factories with five or more employees. Thus
Japanese manufacturing was heavily biased towards light industry, while
heavy industry lagged in the general industrialisation. In the metal in-
dustry, steel output had reached over two million tons, but this met only
some 70 per cent of Japanese demand; similarly in engineering, although
output and range of products had expanded, for machinery as a whole
Japan was still a large importer.
Modem industry was established in Japan at the same time as traditional
occupations, living conditions and attitudes continued. The result was the
emergence of a ‘dual economy’, which became particularly evident in the
1 920s, when modem industry emerged as a significant part of the whole
economy. In all sorts of ways — but especially in technology, incomes,
working and living conditions — a gap existed between the modem and
the traditional sectors to an extent unparalleled in Western society. Such
a social and economic division virtually precluded the emergence of a
Western democratic political system. Moreover, the control and ownership
of the modem sector increasingly came into the hands of the Zaibatsu, the
great Japanese family combines. These had originated in the early Meiji
period in close association with government enterprise and were at the
heart of the Japanese process of industrialisation. Economically, they
contrasted with Western combinations in their freedom from legal restraint
and in the breadth of their business activities, which spanned all fields of
economic activity; in the 1920s they even moved into small-scale com-
merce and manufacturing. Socially, the Zaibatsu in their organisation
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were based on hierarchical status and authoritarian control, and so
brought into modern industry many of the traditions of feudal Japan.
Politically, their association with government became even closer in the
1920s. Principally because of the strength of the Zaibatsu and the almost
unlimited supply of labour in the traditional sector, labour organisations
remained extremely weak. The number of trade unionists had reached
285,000 in 1926, but they were only a small proportion of the work force.
In the overall political and economic structure of Japan, labour organisa-
tions had almost no influence.
The degree of economic influence exercised by the West in Japan had
been kept at a very low level by the method of financing industrialisation
adopted by the Japanese between 1900 and 1930. Only in the period 1897-
1913 did Japan rely at all heavily on foreign capital. In that period she
borrowed some two billion yen, and it is some measure of the importance
of this capital that it amounted to about 20 per cent of gross capital
formation. Again in the ’twenties a further one billion yen was borrowed,
but the growth of the Japanese economy in the intervening period made it
of less importance. But borrowing was carried out almost entirely by the
Japanese government and its agencies from private foreign lenders, so
that foreign influence or direction was minimised. Direct foreign invest-
ment in private business in Japan did exist, but it was small both in relation
to government borrowing and to total Japanese investment in business.
Similarly, the role of foreign entrepreneurship in this period was small.
Between 1900 and 1930 Japanese economic contacts with the outside
world through foreign trade expanded enormously. The quantity of both
imports and exports grew roughly fivefold, and increased in total from
25 to 40 per cent of national income. Japan had now fully entered into the
international economy and was dependent on world markets for her
prosperity. Her position was similar to that of Great Britain in her limited
range of natural resources, specialised skills, and insular position with its
easy access to maritime trade. However, although Japan was now as
dependent on international trade as Britain, her share of world trade was
considerably smaller: it was 2 per cent in 1913 and 3 per cent in 1929,
compared with Britain’s 17 and 13 per cent for the same years. Thus the
impact of the growth of Japanese foreign trade on world trade remained
limited. Imports became increasingly dominated by food, industrial raw
materials especially for textiles and, to some extent, machinery. The
countries that particularly benefited from this trade were the United
States and those of the British Commonwealth. The principal Japanese
export continued to be raw silk, which grew in volume some eight times
between 1900 and 1929; some 80 per cent of total output was exported
in the 1920s, and the United States dominated the market. The most
spectacular growth was in the second most important commodity, cotton
textiles: the volume of cotton piece goods increased some sixteenfold
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between 1900 and 1929, and in volume terms the main markets in 1929
were in Asia, with India taking 32 per cent, China 30 per cent, and the
Netherlands East Indies 1 1 per cent. These two commodities dominated
Japanese exports, so that in 1929 raw silk made up 37 per cent and silk
and cotton manufactures 28 per cent of total exports. It was through these
cotton exports in the 1920s that Japan gave warning of her growing
development as an exporter of manufactures. Cotton was not a dynamic
section of world trade, and Western exporters found it difficult to adjust
to a new competitor. Japan was blamed, for example, for the decline of
Britain’s share of world trade in cotton piece goods from 65 per cent in
1909-13 to 34 per cent in 1928-9. Given the emphasis in Japanese imports
on food and industrial raw materials, there was little in the Japanese
market for Western exporters to soften the effect of Japanese competition
in their own overseas markets. To a large extent, after the world war,
Europe lay outside Japanese trading relations. Japanese competition was
also felt in another depressed industry — shipping. In 1 893 Japanese ships
carried only some 8 per cent of Japanese foreign trade; by 1913 the pro-
portion was a half, and following the shipping boom during the war Japan
emerged with the fourth largest merchant marine, competing throughout
the world and carrying some two-thirds of Japanese foreign trade. In the
1920s shipping receipts went a long way to meeting Japan’s deficit in
trade.
The development of Japanese economic relations with the outside world
was affected by her acquisition of an empire, with which preferential
relationships were established, and to a smaller extent by her special
position in Manchuria. For economic purposes, in this period, the empire
consisted basically of Formosa and Korea. Colonial trade amounted to
some 10 per cent of Japanese foreign trade just before the world war and
to about 20 per cent at the end of the ’twenties. Its economic development
had been directed towards Japanese needs, and it emerged as a supplier of
food and raw materials (especially sugar in Formosa and rice in Korea)
and as a market for Japanese manufactures. Japanese capital was given
a privileged place in its development, as was Japanese shipping in its
trade. The real drive for empire development and co-ordination with the
Japanese economy did not come until the 1930s, with the occupation
of Manchuria and north China. Whether, on balance, Japan had gained
any economic benefits from its empire before 1930 is doubtful. However,
it is worth emphasising Japan’s particular dependence on foreign trade
and its particular interest in a relative freedom of trade and multilateral
settlements. In fact, such a system largely existed, to Japan’s benefit, up to
1930, and the special relationship established by Japan with its colonies
was part of the undermining of the system which precipitated its collapse
in the 1930s.
One of the most striking features of Japanese economic development
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between 1900 and 1930 was the increased involvement of the country in
the world economy, so that changes in world economic conditions quickly
affected economic and social affairs in Japan. Two spectacular and con-
trasting examples may be cited. The world war greatly expanded Japan’s
economic opportunities. European suppliers were cut off from markets
they had previously held, and Japanese-manufactured exports and shipping
services boomed. In particular, the war enabled Japan to replace Britain
in its Asian cotton textile markets. In Japan this world demand led to
rising incomes, employment and industrial expansion: it was a period of
marked prosperity. All was not, however, to Japan’s advantage : inflation
and misused overseas reserves led to social disorders and difficult financial
and trading conditions at the beginning of the 1920s. The opposite effect
to that of the war was felt in Japan when the American depression began
at the end of 1929. We have seen the importance of raw silk in Japan’s
exports, the dependence of about half the peasantry on its production and
the overwhelming dominance of American demand. The American depres-
sion led immediately to a fall in raw silk prices of some 50 per cent during
1930, thus striking at the Japanese economy as a whole and especially
bringing poverty to the countryside. The impact of world depression was
a major factor in discrediting the liberal policy and the political leaders
of the 1 920s and setting the stage for reaction at home and aggression
abroad in the 1930s.
In China, political impotence was both a cause and a consequence of the
lack of economic development similar to that of Japan. It is significant of
China’s economic backwardness and political disorganisation that the
data for the study of the country’s economy during the period 1900-30 are
themselves deficient.
Population appears to have been around 400-450 millions, and the
increase in the period, if any, must have been small. By the end of the
period the structure of employment of the work force had changed little.
Some 80 per cent still remained in agriculture, and the proportion in the
traditional sector as a whole would have been considerably higher, at
some 95 per cent. The modem sector, then, remained small, and had grown
only to the extent of producing about one-eighth of the national income. 1
Nevertheless, in spite of the continuing dominance of the traditional
sector in the economy, China developed as a field for foreign investment,
which by 1902 was valued at £162 million. It doubled to £331 million in
1914 and redoubled to £666 million in 1931. 2 Not all of this can be re-
garded as actual increase in real assets; and it has been estimated that,
after making allowance for price rises, the real increase between 1902 and
1 T. LiuandK. Yeh, The Economy of the Chinese Mainland: National Income and Economic
Development, 1933-1959 (Santa Monica, Cai., 1963), p. 132.
* C. F. Remer, Foreign Investments in China (New York, 1933), p. 58. The figures do not
include the Boxer indemnity, initially worth £67-5 million. It was not in existence in 1902,
amounted to £63-5 million at the end of 1913, and was insignificant in 1931.
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1914 was about 90 per cent and between 1914 and 1931 about 20 per cent. 1
The greater part of this was direct investment by foreigners in firms in
China (around 70 per cent), and the balance was made up of the obliga-
tions of the Chinese government. The direct investment was used mainly
in railways and in areas associated with foreign trade; manufacturing took
only some 10-15 per cent; and almost none went into agriculture. A very
large part of the government borrowing was used for unproductive pur-
poses: some two-fifths (in real terms) went on military and indemnity
purposes, one-fifth on general government administration, while the
balance was spent mainly on railways. Britain was the most important
source of foreign investment in China, with roughly a third of the total
over the whole period. Russia stood second to Britain in 1902, with an
almost equal share, but by 1931 this position had been attained by Japan,
and the Russian component had declined to less than 10 per cent. The
direct investment of the foreign countries was heavily localised. At the end
of the ’twenties, for instance, some three-quarters of British direct invest-
ment was in Shanghai and two-thirds of Japan’s was in Manchuria.
In volume, the foreign trade of China doubled between the end of the
1890s and 1914 and then increased by a further 50 per cent by the end
of the 1920s. 2 In value, it was in 1914 roughly equal to that of Japan,
at 2 per cent of world trade, and it still maintained this proportion at
the end of the 1920s. China, then, was not one of the world’s great
trading nations. As measured by the ratio of foreign trade to national in-
come, trade was not very important to the Chinese economy. Estimates
suggest that it was only some 12 per cent at its peak at the end of the
’twenties; and, since trade was growing much faster than national income
in the intervening period, it must have been much lower at the beginning
of the century. Silk and silk goods continued to be the most important
export till almost the end of the period, although declining from 30 per
cent of total exports in 1900 to 18 per cent in 1928. The effects of economic
change accompanying foreign investment is shown clearly in the rise of
exports of beans and of beancake from Manchuria, from 2 to 21 per cent
of total exports at the end of the ’twenties, by which time it had become
China’s leading export. The effect of industrialisation on imports is seen
principally through the development of a local cotton industry: between
1900 and the end of the ’twenties imports of cotton goods declined from
some 20 per cent of imports to 1 5 per cent, and cotton yam from 1 5 to 2 per
cent, while raw cotton imports rose from nil to 7 per cent. At the same
time China built up a considerable export (4 per cent of total exports) in
cotton goods and yam. During the period a marked change took place
in the relative importance of the various countries trading with China.
1 C. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 1840-1937 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1965), p. 14.
* Y. Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development of China (Washington, D.C., 1956),
pp. 258-9.
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The increasing international use of Hong Kong makes it difficult to allo-
cate trade to specific countries, but what is clear is the relative decline in
European, especially British, trade with China, and the growth in impor-
tance of Japanese and, to some extent, American trade. Between them
these two countries accounted for about half China’s trade.
The bare statistics of foreign investment and trade in China show some
important aspects of the economic impact of the outside world on Chinese
economic development. But they reveal little of the broader framework
that determined the special character of foreign trade and investment in
China. The relative importance of the various countries investing in China
was influenced by their political power in the region, and the great change
during this period was the decline in the position of Russia and Germany
and the rise in that of Japan. Moreover, this investment remained largely
within the concession areas. By 1931 almost a half of all foreign direct
investment was in Shanghai and almost two-fifths, mainly Japanese and
to some extent Russian, in Manchuria. Railways — one of the early im-
portant fields of direct foreign investment — were built more for political
and military purposes than for profit. Even the small part of government
borrowing which was used productively in the building of railways, and
not for indemnity for lost wars or servicing past borrowing, normally
involved putting the construction and control of the lines in foreign hands.
Almost all foreign loans before 1914 were secured by giving foreigners
control over specific properties, revenues and taxes of the Chinese govern-
ment. Even if the political implications of foreign investment are ignored,
the economic effects are difficult to assess. On the credit side foreign invest-
ment was a means of introducing modem technology into China; it
accounted for a large part of such modernisation as took place; in parti-
cular locations it provided the stability, law and social overhead capital —
transport, public utilities, banking — which benefited Chinese as well as
foreign enterprises. 1 On the other hand, the servicing of the foreign debt
was a very heavy burden on central government finances, and the very
success of foreign investment in its limited areas led to their isolation from
the rest of China and the sustained existence of a very marked dual
economy.
While investment tended to be localised, the effects of foreign trade
were more widespread, though limited to areas near transport facilities,
especially along the coast. The products of Western industry were made
available to the Chinese, while export markets were provided for a wide
range of products from the traditional sector. Generally speaking, through-
out this period the ‘ open door ’ policy was observed in China’s trade,
with one major exception : by various means Japan was able to obtain
1 Foreign capital was dominant in the fields of railways, shipping, foreign trade, iron and
coal-mining, but in factory manufacturing one estimate places the Chinese share of total
output in 1933 at 65 per cent (see C. Hou, Foreign Investment, pp. 127-301).
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favourable treatment for her own goods in Manchuria, so that about two-
thirds of that area’s trade in the 1920s was with the Japanese empire.
The outstanding characteristics of China’s economic history during
this period were the limited degree of modernisation and the small amount
of foreign investment and trade. By 1914, when her share of world trade
was roughly 2 per cent, China had received about 3^ per cent of all foreign
investment. At these levels, foreign trade and investment could not have
effected a significant transformation of the economy, even if much of the
investment had not been directed towards political ends. In part, the
smallness of the foreign involvement can be explained in terms of the
general lack of profitable opportunities in low-income countries with a
high population density. But, in part also, it was a consequence of the
Chinese failure to adapt to the needs of economic modernisation and of
the political disorder that was endemic in the country throughout the
period.
The acceptance, albeit reluctantly, by the Western powers of the erosion
of their privileges during the 1920s reflected, in part, the small scale of
their economic interests. For Britain, in 1929, investments in China
represented only 5 per cent of her foreign investments and trade with
China only 3 per cent of her external trade. For Japan, on the other hand,
the changed position of China presented a substantial problem. Japanese
investment in Manchuria, and the trade which was largely based upon
her privileged position in that part of China, made important contribu-
tions to her national income. Moreover, she continued to look to Man-
churia — as she had done since the beginning of the century— as a source
of raw materials essential to her increasingly industrialised economy. By
1930 the position of Manchuria was the critical point in China’s inter-
national relations.
Most of the forces that reshaped Far Eastern politics in the ’twenties
had become apparent during the war or its immediate aftermath. But in
the years following the Washington Conference the powers paid scant
regard to them. They tended to ignore the broader implications of Japan’s
increasing industrialisation, of the emergence of a new generation of
leaders in China, and of the Soviet Union’s determination to play a major
role in the region. This neglect was, in part, a consequence of their in-
ability to comprehend the character or scale of these developments; but
it derived, more directly, from their preoccupation with considerations of
a different order. At Washington they had created a framework for inter-
national co-operation in the Far East; and current circumstances con-
firmed them in their resolve to confine their policies within it. Japan’s
economic ties with the United States provided her government with a
powerful reason for eschewing expansionist aims in China. And, more
generally, the disordered state of China encouraged restraint. Economic
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objectives — whether in relation to the development of trade or the pay-
ment of debts — could not be effectively pursued; and it was easy to argue
that the time was not ripe either for the termination of extra-territoriality
or for the restoration of tariff autonomy.
None the less, the powers had agreed at Washington to discuss China’s
demand for the removal of restrictions upon her control of the tariff. For
several years action was postponed not only because of the general reserva-
tions of the major powers but also because France had declined to ratify
the customs treaty. In 1925, however, after French ratification had been
obtained, the Washington powers accepted an invitation from China to
attend a tariff conference at Peking in October of that year. Detailed and
carefully considered proposals for the restoration of tariff autonomy were
presented by the government of China. These were accepted by the repre-
sentatives of the powers, in so far as they related to the ultimate solution
of the problem. But disagreement arose regarding the arrangements that
should operate during a transitional period. The conference was unwilling
to place substantially increased revenue in the hands of the Chinese while
the country remained politically unstable. Since the Peking government
controlled only a relatively small part of China, it seemed certain that
much of the additional revenue would fall into the hands of rival war-lords
and thus exacerbate the prevailing disorder. While the conference was in
session, conditions in China further deteriorated. Fighting between rival
factions cut communication between Peking and the sea; hostile demon-
strations against the government occurred in the city itself; and, finally,
in April 1926 the regime of Tuan Ch’i-jui fell from power. This last event
was followed, perforce, by a suspension of the conference.
During the first weeks of the conference, the American Minister to
Peking, in writing to Washington, had pointed to the unreality of dis-
cussing the attainment of long-term objectives with a government that
might not be able to retain office ‘ for more than a few weeks or even a few
days’. 1 As discussion proceeded, members of the conference also became
increasingly aware of the element of fiction that underlay the whole policy
of international co-operation in the Far East. And, after the final collapse
of the conference, the governments which had been represented at it were
forced to recognise the deficiencies of the ‘Washington system’ and to
begin to redefine their positions upon a more realistic basis.
In their thinking upon China, the powers had failed, in particular, to
take adequate account of the actions of Russia. The Soviet Union had
reached a settlement of Russo-Chinese differences in a treaty signed with
the Peking government in 1924; and, in doing so, it had emphasised its
‘ anti-imperialist ’ stand by abandoning any claim to extra-territorial rights
for its citizens. But, of far greater importance, it had established close
1 Quoted in Akira Iriye, After Imperialism. The Search for a New Order in the Far East,
1921-1931 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 72.
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relations with the Nationalist movement centred on Canton. With the help
of Russian advisers, the Kuomintang was reorganised. It adopted a totali-
tarian structure resembling that of the Communist party in Russia; it
developed methods for the mass indoctrination of workers and peasants;
and it acquired a body of doctrine in ‘The Three People’s Principles’
presented to it by Sun Yat-sen, as its president, in 1924. In addition, it
entered into an alliance with the Chinese Communist party, which had
been formed in Shanghai in 1921. These political moves were comple-
mented by the creation of a revolutionary army. To provide leadership
for this force that would be both technically competent and politically
sound, a military academy was established near Canton, under the direc-
tion of Chiang Kai-shek.
The Russians had thus changed the situation in China in two important
ways. Through their relations both with Peking and with the Nationalist
movement, they had stimulated antagonism towards the Western powers
and Japan. Through their assistance to the Nationalists, they had decisively
shifted the balance of political power in the country. Before the arrival of
Russian advisers, the Kuomintang had been kept together largely by its
members’ common acceptance of the need for political modernisation and
by their loyalty to the person of Sun Yat-sen; and its government at
Canton had been dependent for military support upon alliances with
provincial leaders. Under Russian guidance, it had been transformed into
a powerful revolutionary organisation, able to use both force and per-
suasion effectively in its pursuit of power.
When the tariff conference came to its ignominious end, the Kuomin-
tang army was on the point of marching northward. Since the death of
Sun Yat-sen in the previous year, the leadership of the movement had
been weakened by antagonism between supporters and opponents of the
link with the Communists; and this division continued to complicate the
Nationalists’ thrust for power. But, in relation to popular attitudes to-
wards the advancing army, the dispute within the leadership was a factor
of secondary importance. ‘The ultimate cause of all the difficulties and
sufferings of the Chinese people’, the Nationalists had declared. Ties with
the aggression of the imperialists and the cruelty and violence of their
tools, the nation-selling warlords.’ 1 As the army passed through country
where Kuomintang agents had been active among both civilians and pro-
vincial soldiers, it was received as a force of liberation. By the end of 1927
a Nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, was established at
Nanking and was preparing to send the army north again to topple the
enfeebled government that still survived at Peking, under the leadership
of the Manchurian war-lord Chang Tso-lin.
From the beginning of the ‘northern expedition’ the powers had been
compelled to take account of the Nationalists’ success. But they had also
1 Quoted ibid. p. 93.
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been confronted by other evidence that the Chinese were no longer willing
to tolerate encroachments upon the country’s sovereignty. The Peking
government, as well as the Nationalists, began to collect additional
customs duties that the tariff conference had refused to authorise. Foreign
privileges were frequently ignored in the treaty ports. And the demand for
a fundamental revision of all treaties was asserted as uncompromisingly
by northern merchants and industrialists as by the Kuomintang.
These developments produced a gradual change in the attitudes of the
powers. Since the principle of international co-operation had been under-
mined by their dilatory and unrealistic approach to the situation in China
during the preceding years, they began to act independently in defence
of their national interests.
For Britain, the problem was a particularly complex one. Her interests
were long established and substantial in scale, and they were largely
concentrated in areas that were affected at an early stage by the Nationalist
advance. For these reasons, a major share of Chinese antagonism to
foreign interests was directed upon them. But, for the same reasons,
Britain was the first of the powers to recognise the importance of estab-
lishing friendly relations with the Nationalists and of preparing for the
time when they should have occupied Peking. The British government
made it clear that it would be ready to discuss treaty revision and other
matters as soon as political stability was restored. In the meantime, it
sought to maintain a balance between the making of minor concessions
and the defence of its major interests. Foremost among the latter was the
British interest in Shanghai. When the growth of civil disorder seemed to
endanger trade and investment and the security of British nationals in
Shanghai, the British military establishment there was heavily reinforced.
By this action — so much more clear cut than the conciliatory gestures and
statements of intent by which the British government had hoped to gain
Chinese goodwill — anti-British feeling was strengthened among both the
Nationalists and the supporters of the Peking government.
The principal beneficiary of the British protection of Shanghai was
probably the United States. The American government, like the British,
hoped for the emergence of a stable regime in China which would be able
to exercise the full powers of sovereignty ; but it had been somewhat less
conciliatory than the British in its general handling of the immediate
situation. None the less, by being relieved of the necessity for military
intervention in defence of American interests, it was able to preserve the
country’s reputation as China's firmest friend.
To Japan, the changed situation in China was of critical importance;
but, since her interests were preponderantly in the north, she had some
time in which to develop — and to reveal — her new strategy. In January
1927, when the Nationalist advance into north China seemed imminent,
the Japanese Foreign Minister, Shidehara Kijuro, made a statement of
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policy in very general terms. The Japanese government, like those of
Britain and the United States, declared that the Chinese should be left to
settle their internal differences and affirmed its willingness to consider
sympathetically Chinese demands. But it also stressed the need for close
economic co-operation between the two countries and for the protection
of Japanese interests. This statement, by its very generality, left Japan
with ample scope for manoeuvre ; and, within the next few months, several
events occurred that led to an increasing emphasis upon its more positive
precepts and implications. In April a new government took office in
Tokyo, led by Tanaka Giichi, a man of military background, who was
firmly committed to the maintenance of Japan’s position in Manchuria.
A little earlier Nationalist soldiers had attacked foreigners and damaged
foreign property in Nanking. Responsibility for these attacks was attri-
buted to the Communist — and thus Russian-inspired — section of the
movement. Japan was therefore able, without inconsistency, to give posi-
tive support to the Nationalist right wing, led by Chiang Kai-shek.
The January statement had not specifically mentioned Japanese interests
in Manchuria. Essentially, Japan was concerned with the protection of
her right to dominate the Manchurian economy and to integrate it with
her own and with the maintenance of the administrative and other services
that were necessary to the fulfilment of her economic objectives. A con-
siderable range of views was held in Japanese circles as to how these
interests could best be protected; but it was everywhere taken for granted
that the Manchurian problem should be handled separately from that of
relations with China proper.
Though Japanese leaders thus considered that the Manchurian problem
was, in itself, of a special character, they recognised that their solution of
it would affect their relations not only with China but also with the
Western powers. For this reason, their thinking was influenced by con-
sideration both of existing relationships and of expectations regard-
ing the future. Those who were anxious not to disturb Japan’s close links
with the United States found in this, for example, a strong ground for
favouring a solution that would leave substantial authority in the hands
of a Chinese or Manchurian administration. Those, on the other hand,
who believed that war with the United States was eventually inevitable
regarded complete control as essential to Japan’s defence. Differences of
this kind, coupled with the vested interests of the military and civil groups
concerned in the exercise of Japan’s rights in Manchuria, greatly compli-
cated the development of a clear-cut policy.
When the Chinese Nationalist army continued its move northward in
1928, the question of Manchuria became an urgent one for the govern-
ment of Japan. Faced with the likelihood that Nationalist troops would
soon reach the Manchurian border, it issued a statement of its own posi-
tion. The Nationalists should not enter Manchuria and would be opposed
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by Japanese forces if they did so. Chang Tso-lin should retire from Peking
but be permitted to form a separate government in Manchuria. On many
grounds, this was a blatantly disingenuous proposal that ill concealed
Japanese determination to detach Manchuria from China and control it
through a puppet administration. But, up to a point, it was acted upon.
The Nationalists, as their advance brought them towards Peking, offered
to allow Chang Tso-lin and his forces to withdraw peacefully into Man-
churia. Since his regime faced imminent collapse, Chang accepted the
offer; but, when he reached Manchuria, the railway carriage in which he
was travelling was blown up by Japanese army officers.
The Nationalist occupation of Peking marked the attainment, in a formal
sense, of the objective towards which the revolutionary movement had
been working since the formation of the Tung-meng-hui in 1905. China
possessed a government that could claim jurisdiction over the whole of the
country and that was committed to handling its relations with foreign
powers on terms of equality. In reality, however, the Nationalists were
still confronted by formidable difficulties. The leaders of the new govern-
ment were deeply divided on basic issues of domestic policy. The govern-
ment’s actual authority in the provinces was very limited, so that it could
neither obtain the revenue from land taxes nor disarm the private armies
of the former war-lords ; and in relation to Manchuria its position remained
a particularly difficult one. At the end of 1928, after the failure of Japanese
efforts to prevent it, the reunion of China and Manchuria was brought
about; but the Manchurian government retained a large measure of
autonomy, and the presence of the Japanese in the region created a further
impediment to Chinese control. The internal weakness of the government
did not prevent it, however, from adopting a strong foreign policy.
Soon after the occupation of Peking, the Nationalist government
declared its intention of terminating all unequal treaties. This action
evoked a generally sympathetic response. In accordance with their earlier
policy statements, the Western powers signed new treaties that restored
tariff autonomy to China ; and, in doing so, they accorded recognition to
the new regime. In the case of the United States, support for the govern-
ment went considerably further. American advisers were sent to China;
and American business interests provided financial and technical assistance.
Japanese policy towards China was both more complex and less un-
equivocal. The assassination of Chang Tso-lin had been an attempt by a
section of the army to push the Japanese government further than it was
prepared to go. Its organisers had hoped that it would create disorder in
Manchuria and thus lead to the establishment of Japanese military con-
trol. In the event, they merely reinforced existing Chinese suspicions of
their country’s intentions, since neither the Japanese nor the Chinese
government was willing to precipitate a crisis.
The position of the Tanaka cabinet was a difficult one. It believed that
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the protection of Japanese interests in Manchuria required both an
improvement in the country’s relations with the Western powers and a
curbing of the intransigence, and growing insubordination, of the army.
But the powers had been alienated by the high-handed actions of the army;
and the latter’s support for an aggressive policy was strengthened by the
evident unwillingness of the powers to act jointly with Japan. In these
circumstances, the cabinet decided that it was essential to establish a close
working relationship with the Chinese Nationalists. When Manchuria
was reunited with China, the Japanese government therefore accepted the
development without protest. Meanwhile, it had begun discussions with
the Chinese regarding the restoration of tariff autonomy and the settle-
ment of other matters that were in dispute between them. When agreement
in principle was reached on these issues, it was followed by Japan’s formal
recognition of the new regime in China.
Shortly after this development occurred, Tanaka resigned from office.
For some time he had been faced with growing opposition, as a result of
his inability to bring to trial the officers responsible for the assassination
of Chang Tso-lin. The new Prime Minister, Hamaguchi Osachi, and his
cabinet were even more firmly committed to a policy of moderation in
Manchuria and to seeking the co-operation of the Western powers.
Primarily, they were influenced by economic considerations. They believed
that the long-term interests of Japan would best be served by exposing its
economy more fully to the ordinary pressures of international trade. They
therefore removed restrictions on the export of gold and, by doing so,
increased the country’s dependence, during the subsequent period of
adjustment, on the support of other major trading nations. But the new
policy, by placing less emphasis on the economic links between Japan and
Manchuria, directly affected the government’s attitude towards China.
The most important consequence of this diminished concern with the
maintenance of special privileges was the replacement of the general agree-
ment that had previously been reached on tariff autonomy by a formal
treaty.
For the government of China, the treaty with Japan marked the success-
ful conclusion of its struggle for control of the tariff. But it had been no
less concerned with the removal of restrictions upon its jurisdiction over
foreigners. 1 In April 1929 it had addressed notes to Britain, the United
States and France seeking an early termination of extra-territoriality.
During the following months, the powers made it clear that, while they
favoured the gradual reduction of extra-territorial rights, they were not
prepared to agree to their complete abrogation almost immediately, as
desired by the Chinese. Their reservations were strengthened by the brash
actions of the Chinese government at this time against Russian consular
1 On this subject, see Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extra-territoriality in China (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1952), pp. 127-87.
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and railway officials in Manchuria, which precipitated a brief armed
conflict with the Soviet Union. And in 1930 and 1931, when the renewal
of civil war in China emphasised both the tenuousness of the government’s
authority and the continued insecurity of foreign residents, their doubts
increased as to whether the time was ripe for any radical change. None the
less, negotiations were continued ; and by the summer of 1931 both Britain
and the United States had reached a substantial measure of agreement
with China. In September, however, Japanese troops seized the city of
Mukden, in Manchuria. The tragic significance of this event was quickly
recognised : it weakened the position of the government of China far more
disastrously than the disturbances of the immediately preceding years.
Discussions on the ending of extra-territoriality were therefore suspended
till the return of more settled times.
The resort to violence in Manchuria was not the result of a change in the
policy of the Japanese government. The cabinet had not abandoned the
economic and foreign policies that it had espoused on its accession to
office in 1929; but the acceptability of those policies, and hence the
effectiveness of the government itself, had been undermined by events.
Japan’s return to the gold standard had been closely followed by the
onset of the world depression. The effect on the Japanese economy of
falling prices and contracting markets was thus exacerbated by its recently
increased exposure to world pressures. Nor could Japan obtain assistance
from the United States or Britain, since they too were facing economic
crises. The decline in incomes and employment was widely attributed to
the defects of the government and its policies.
The growth of popular opposition greatly strengthened the hand of the
military. The view that Japan’s survival depended on the strengthening
of her armed forces and the consolidation of her position in China, rather
than upon her co-operation with the Western powers, now possessed mass
support. High-ranking officers, both in Tokyo and in Manchuria, there-
fore prepared to take revolutionary action. A plot to overthrow the
government in May 1931 had failed. But the seizure of Mukden on the
night of 18-19 September marked the beginning of a period of military
dominance in Japan.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the international politics of
the Far East and the Pacific had been dominated by the Western powers.
By the 1930s those powers were, at most, reluctant imperialists. In China,
their surviving privileges were retained mainly because the Chinese had
been unable to resolve their internal problems. In the islands of the South
Pacific, the continuance of their administrative responsibilities merely
reflected their acceptance of common assumptions regarding the capacity
of ‘ backward’ peoples to govern themselves. In Australiaand New Zealand,
the residual powers that were still possessed by Britain were retained at the
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request of the governments of those two countries, which had been un-
willing to accept the removal of restrictions upon their sovereignty that the
Statute of Westminster made available to them. 1
But the role that had once been theirs was now being assumed by
Japan. The seizure of Mukden was followed by the complete conquest
of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Inter-
vention by the League of Nations, with the intention of restoring the
sovereignty of China under conditions that would provide protection for
Japanese rights and interests, was angrily opposed by Japan and led to her
resignation from the organisation.
These actions further reduced political stability in the Far East. Since
domestic political circumstances made withdrawal impossible, Japan in-
evitably extended the scope of her aggression (see below, ch. xxm). To
counter increasing Chinese hostility, the Japanese built up their position
in Inner Mongolia and in the north-eastern provinces of China proper by
a combination of military action and political intrigue. In 1937 an armed
exchange between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking precipitated
a full-scale invasion of China. The Nationalist government, forced to flee
westward, established a new capital at Chungking; and in 1940 Japan
installed a puppet regime at Nanking.
Japanese imperialism had reached maturity, however, at a period in
which major international conflicts could be resolved only on a world
scale. The seizure of Mukden and its consequences had encouraged both
Italy and Germany similarly to flout world opinion; and with both these
powers Japan made pacts. Japanese policy towards China was thus a
major cause of the second world war; and its ultimate success or failure
became a matter which only the results of that war could determine.
1 See ch. xm.
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CHAPTER XIII
THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH
OF NATIONS
N ever had the British Empire been more unpopular in the world
than it was when the nineteenth century passed over into the
twentieth; never indeed had the idea of empire been more question-
able in the eyes even of a number of the subjects of that empire; but never
did the majority of Britons feel more justified in taking pride in the domi-
nance which it exerted over so large a part of the earth’s surface — its
‘dominion over palm and pine’. The extraordinary, the frightful happen-
ings in South Africa, where for a few months the British army was so
ubiquitously beaten by elusive bands of bearded farmers, gave delight
to those Europeans who now saw perfidious Albion in decline and fall.
But Albion, though puzzled and perturbed, did not think of decline and
fall; it sighed over its generals, sent out others, accepted help from the
colonies (‘the lion’s cubs’, in the language of the time, ‘rallying to the
dam’); and with tedious inevitability wore the farmers down. On 31 May
1902 the Boer leaders accepted the Peace of Vereeniging and British
sovereignty. The readers of Kipling were reassured; the Union Jack,
fluttering above the veld, marked the triumph of civilisation and efficiency;
the way stood open for the pacifying efforts of Lord Milner’s ‘kinder-
garten’, the young men from Oxford whose minds were suffused with the
fight of a liberal empire ; and colonial Prime Ministers, like New Zealand’s
Richard John Seddon, released the ample folds of their homespun elo-
quence, congratulating and advising, upon a Mother Country that was
both gratified and embarrassed.
Yet at that peak of victory men might well have been touched by
anxious questionings. The disappointed enemies of Albion, could they
have seen farther, might yet have had their comfort. For all was not lost
to the overwhelmed and obscurantist old man, Kruger, to his defeated
yet hopeful juniors Botha and Smuts. The Boer mind was not conquered :
the treaty had promised self-government. The conquerors, it seemed, had
at last learned the lesson proclaimed by Burke, that a great empire and
little minds go ill together. They intended to be magnanimous; and the
magnanimous empire, it became plain in the next fifty years, would cease
to be an empire at all in any sense intelligible to older centuries. Even
to the mid-nineteenth century, which had made the remarkable discovery
of ‘ responsible government for colonies ’, the development of that respon-
sible government might perhaps have seemed too extravagantly logical.
Dominion, it was to become plain, could not be exercised over dominions.
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Certainly the phrase ‘dominion status’ had not, in 1902, been invented.
They were few, after all, who gazed on the word ‘empire’ with queasy
stomachs. Earnest federalists there were who showed worry about the
future of the empire. But to most people, Britons or colonials, imperial
stability, like European stability, was in the order of things. Amid re-
asserted stability they did not pause to consider the implications for empire
of the other British ideal of freedom: freedom, the instrument of mag-
nanimity. There were Victorians, no doubt, who would have accepted
as natural the Statute of Westminster, 1931 ; but would they have under-
stood the extraordinary cohesive power that has gone with this flight from
imperiuml
The Victorian theory of empire was not, of course, simple, and was not
static. It had dropped close economic control as one of its ingredients
and objects. From a free-trade, still laissez-faire Britain the imperial
statesmen looked out tolerantly enough, though a little uneasily, on
self-governing colonies which had become steadily protectionist— and
some of which, like New Zealand and its Australian sister, by 1900 had
ceased to regard laissez faire as at all a tolerable social rule. In the imperial
economy these communities, with Canada and Newfoundland, were still
preponderantly ‘primary producers’ — the role of the southern ones
accentuated by the brilliant success obtained in the refrigeration of meat
and butter. But that did not affect the variety of their political develop-
ment, under the benevolent metropolitan eye. The unitary system of small
New Zealand or smaller, sparsely settled Newfoundland had little in
common — save responsible government — with the thirty-year-old federal-
ism of Canada, or with that other federalism which came into operation
in the brand-new Australian Commonwealth on the first day of 1901.
Nor were the two federations at all identical in design, in distribution of
powers or in the power to adjust and amend : Australia was determined
that necessary change should be as exclusively as possible an Australian
concern, 1 while the Judicial Committee had been, and was still to be, one
of the great interpreters of Canadian constitutionalism, and amendments
to the British North America Act of 1 867 could be made only by parliament
at Westminster. Different from federal and unitary governments alike,
different also in its place in world economics, was the Cape Colony, with
its South African neighbours; poor in agricultural resources, leaning
heavily on gold and diamonds, its politics complicated by the status of
a governor who had at once to work with responsible ministers and, as
High Commissioner, to control relations with Boers whether independent
or conquered, and with native peoples under British rule inside South
African geographical limits; a governor who was at once constitutional
1 Nevertheless the decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on some
Australian cases, involving federal powers, carried to it on appeal have been of marked
significance — for example, the judgements on marketing of 1936, and on the nationalisation
of banks of 1949.
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head of a self-governing colony and an administrative and diplomatic
official responsible to England. But, though this was so at the beginning
of the century, within a decade war, magnanimity, and economic necessity
had done their work; and the Union of South Africa Act of 1909 created
still another constitutional variant of that self-government which, accord-
ing to Campbell-Bannerman’s paradox of statesmanship, was better than
‘good’ government. It was neither federalism, nor, in the New Zealand
sense, quite unitary, for the South African provinces had real powers.
It could, by men like Botha and Smuts, be worked as good government;
and the Union, in its relations to the imperial power, took its place
securely enough as another of those dominions beyond the seas which
owed allegiance to the crown but were, certainly, no longer simply colonies
of England. An index of that subtle but far-reaching change had been the
formal enlargement of the status of New Zealand from ‘colony’ to
‘dominion’ in 1907; though what precisely might be implied in that status,
beyond compliment, was for legal conference. The Dominion of Canada
was a Dominion; so, now, was New Zealand; so was Newfoundland;
Australia was a Commonwealth; South Africa was a Union. Was there
any difference, within the ambit of the Empire?
Whatever the answer to that question might be, there was no doubt
of the difference between them and other parts of the Empire: those parts
that before long were to be called in general, in distinction from Common-
wealth and Dominions, ‘the colonial empire’: the moribund West Indies,
into the economy of which Joseph Chamberlain had recently injected the
stimulus of an Imperial Department of Agriculture; the large areas of
the upper and lower Niger, just ceded by a commercial company to the
crown, and the other territories of West Africa, fatal with fevers, waiting
on the schools of tropical medicine founded in England in 1899; the
Rhodesias, still smelling somewhat to tender consciences of the blood of
the Matabele; the great Bechuanaland and Nyasaland protectorates; the
other protectorates of Uganda and British East Africa, where the Foreign
Office presided over economic penetration; the virtual protectorate of
Egypt and the Sudan, the ‘joint possession’ of Egypt and Great Britain;
Ceylon; the native states of Malaysia, and Singapore and Hong Kong,
those two nodal points of an immense commerce, polyglot empires in
themselves; in the great ocean to the south, a spatter of islands Polynesian,
Micronesian, Melanesian — more or less exploited, more or less mis-
sionised, less rather than more administered. Here was an odd assemblage
of bits and pieces, almost entirely the product of Victorian expansion ; and
very clearly, so the Edwardians as well as Victorians thought, unfit for
self-government. Without civilised or scientific tradition, unacquainted
with the amiable conventions of parliamentary debate, only a few years
earlier large numbers of their peoples had stumbled in the long sad
fettered lines of the slave trade, had speared one another or had their
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brains knocked out in fantastic varieties of savage experience; or had
merely fished and picked coconuts. It was indeed clear that for them good
government was better than self-government; that for them young empire-
builders should drive the road and bridge the ford, direct plantation-labour
and impose the Law. But was it — altogether — clear? What, after all, was
good government? What was the Law? The decades immediately in the
future were to see some questioning, some diversity of answer, on these
points ; and the lapse of another fifty years made it begin to seem improb-
able that a sharp line could be forever drawn, in constitutional status,
between the dominions and the colonies, the free communities and the
dependent empire.
And there was India. For India the division of centuries was to be a
division of epochs, economic as well as political. Autocracy virtually
untouched was attended in Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty with uproar and
indignation. What change would there be? How far was the Indian tradi-
tion inimical to self-government?
The historian, gazing back, can see change and at least some of the
determinants of change. Most of the imperial fabric had been raised in a
remarkably short space of time, in a world that strongly affected the
fashion of building, and could not cease to affect it in a new century.
Economic and social development on a world scale, two world wars and
a vast depression, political and social revolution, the ground-swell of
Asian unrest, were among the determinants. So also was political wisdom,
in despite of vested interests: magnanimity in spite of the arguments of
fear. In a remarkably short space of time the Victorian— or Edwardian
— empire was gone, utterly destroyed, the insubstantial pageant of its
imperial vision faded. And yet something remained for a future historian
to define ; the extraordinary British paradox remained ; a ‘ Commonwealth ’
— whatever that term really meant — remained.
The development of the twentieth-century empire, then, on a basis of
‘determinants’, is a psychological development. The change of mind
displays itself, for example, in unease at the speaking of the very word
‘empire’. Men did not wish to be dominated — that had long been true
in the settled colonies ; it was to become true in a very short time in India,
and rather more slowly, irregularly indeed, in large parts of the ‘ dependent
empire’. But also they no longer wished to dominate. The imperialism of
the ’nineties, part crude, part liberal, a good deal romantic, began to give
way to a new attitude, rather sceptical, increasingly critical. The literature
of imperialism began to be a literature of research, critical certainly, in
which nineteenth-century humanitarianism was linked increasingly to a
new ethnological approach, and to a determination to take full account
of economic factors. Its critical role stimulated controversy (where the
African colonies were concerned) reminiscent of the great days of Abori-
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gines Protection a hundred years before. There was this difference, that
in the course of the century it had become rather difficult for the reformer
to be self-righteous ; human association of all kinds had become too much
the object of exhaustive examination.
It remains true that, in the greater part of the period now being con-
sidered, constitutional interest centres on the development of the relations
of that group of communities which came to be called the British Common-
wealth of Nations — of the United Kingdom and the dominions, the
imperial metropolis and the semi-British societies who were exploiting
the possibilities of responsible self-government. ‘Semi-British’ it is neces-
sary to write; for, however much some dominions might glory in their
British blood and tradition, the French-Canadians of Quebec, the Afri-
kaners of the Union, the Irish of the Free State (or Eire) made the problem
of relations a perpetually unfinished one. The position of ‘racial’ minori-
ties within the whole had been by no means so happily accommodated as
enthusiastic persons were wont to assume in the early days of the century;
the general British community as a reconciler of national differences had
still some way to go.
It is this fact which is one of the underlying causes of the growing feeling
of nationality in more than one dominion. French-Canadians showed
no sign of being assimilated; their birth-rate was high, they were virtually
a colonising people, as they spilled over into the other provinces of Canada ;
and wherever they went they carried the demand for special provision
for their needs. Quebec remained a corner-stone of federal politics; its
views of the world at large were a determinant in Canadian foreign policy
that ministers would have ignored with peril certainly, and probably with
disaster. But at least the French-Canadian was in a federation that
managed to get along fairly peaceably within itself as the decades passed;
he was not a republican ; he was not tempted to take advantage of crisis
by armed rebellion. In South Africa, on the other hand, there was an
element never reconciled to British hegemony or even to British associa-
tion; the war of 1899 threw off a last flurry in the rebellion of 1914; and
this Afrikaner irreconcilability was the despair of many people who
considered themselves reasonable. The Dutch Reformed church was a
focus of tradition as compelling as the Catholicism of Quebec; in Afri-
kaans there was a language susceptible of literary development, and, as
in Quebec, an infant native literature began to be consciously cultivated.
The material unification of the world was to be offset, it seemed, by
increasing cultural fission. In South Africa there was the added factor
that the Afrikaner, with his distaste for the British association, considered
himself also a member of a master race, the rock and fortress of European
civilisation in the midst of the inferior millions of the native tribes. Here
was complete intransigence, implacability emotional as well as political.
Compared to this, the influence of an Irish strain in the population of
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eastern Australia might seem quite negligible; yet, counting up the causes
of Australian nationalism it would be wrong to omit that strain, with its
determination not to be taken in by any branch of English policy any-
where. On the whole, however, the national sentiment of Australia was
Australian, owing something to the continental nature and democratic
social development of the country, and marked by a literature that was
sometimes almost belligerently self-conscious in its cultivation of local
colour. Only in New Zealand was national status uncomplicated by the
existence of a national minority; for the Maori people, though in this
period working out a sort of cultural and economic renaissance of extreme
importance to itself, was not in the least concerned with status in an
empire or commonwealth. A real feeling of New Zealand nationality, a
thing felt in the bones, bom of time and isolation, came only in the
’thirties and ’forties — or perhaps the first individual expression of it came
only then. There were New Zealanders before.
For more than one reason, beyond national tradition, these com-
munities began to feel, and to press, a separate identity; and in the
complex twentieth-century world there was ample scope for difference
of opinion. To speak in general terms, for fifty years their life was be-
coming steadily more complex, was being lived steadily on a larger scale.
Economically by no means self-sufficient, they were yet building a wider
basis for wealth, and were producing more of it. The old simple theory of
imperial preference was going with the old simple relation of primary
producer to metropolitan manufacturer and financier; even where, as in
the case of New Zealand, that relation essentially remained, the impact
of the Great Depression, followed by world war, urged a determination
to manufacture; and the material of manufacture, even if not local, might
not necessarily come from Great Britain. To take an example, the steel
used in New Zealand towards the end of this period was largely the
product of Australia. Australia, still with wheat and wool as fundamental
exports, created heavy as well as light industries which had reached major
importance by 1939; and, while the prairie provinces of Canada stood
deep in their ocean of wheat, its industrialised eastern provinces joined
the great manufacturing countries of the world. Populations were in-
creasing, though the centre of white population still remained the United
Kingdom; but, more important, they were increasing as native-born
Canadians or Australians, with family ties concentrated in the one country,
and with less and less tendency to think in terms of a ‘mother-country’,
as the nineteenth-century sentiment of ‘Home’ steadily faded. To all this,
in a world of trouble and strategic calculations, were added the facts and
the implications of geography; the fact that Canada, sharing the economic
life and philosophy of the United States, was becoming an American
power; the fact that Australia, almost unconsciously, was becoming a
Pacific power; the fact that Great Britain could no longer control all the
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oceans of the world ; the fact, explicit as the decade of the ’forties opened,
that not merely were the days of expansion over, but the prospect of power
was a dwindling one.
This dispersed nationalism in itself, even in its early days, would have
been enough to render null the theory of imperial federation that had
attracted so many well-meaning people in the last twenty years of Victoria’s
reign: when the fourth Colonial Conference met in London in 1902 the
issue was dead, and no later agitation, however ingenious and plausible
the reasoning, could breathe life into it. The proposal brought before the
Imperial Conference of 19 11 by Sir Joseph Ward, the Prime Minister of
New Zealand, was notable for the unanimity and scorn with which it was
pulverised by his fellow statesmen. Yet in retrospect this proposal has a
significance which is lost if it is regarded merely as an attempt to revive
the dead cause. For Ward was not thinking merely of constitution-
building, nor even of defence — which had already concerned Imperial
Conferences a good deal. In 1902 Canada, breaking away from the general
meagre support of the British navy, proposed to build a fleet of its own,
an example followed with more immediate effect by Australia in 1907.
In that year, however, there was common agreement over the foundation
of the Imperial General Staff. Ward wished to improve on this, and to
create a sort of ‘Imperial Parliament of defence’, which should control
not merely naval and military matters, but the whole scope of foreign
policy. His lower chamber elected on a population basis would certainly
have deprived any partner except the United Kingdom of real power;
and, apart from other details, the sacrifice of autonomy was too great a
price to pay. Nor, argued Mr Asquith, could the United Kingdom pos-
sibly share control of foreign policy : there sovereignty must be unimpaired.
But the desire for a share was precisely what lay behind Ward’s imprecise
scheme. Not merely was he conscientiously anxious for participation in
the burden of defence : he was anxious also that dominions which might
be called on to shed blood as a result of British policy should have some
say in its formation.
Nor was New Zealand alone in this feeling, or, indeed, generally the
most prominent in expressing it. Ward’s inadequate exercise in federalism
was, paradoxically enough, only one offshoot in a general growth of
autonomy, which was leading the dominions inevitably, though hardly as
deliberate choosers, towards an individual international status. (Nothing
ever more admirably illustrated Cromwell’s dictum that no man goes
farther than he who knows not where he is going.) Their right to separate
withdrawal from or adherence to British trade treaties was followed in
1907 by recognition of their right to negotiate their own trade treaties,
subject only to final signature by a Foreign Office-accredited plenipoten-
tiary. Then came the Anglo-American arbitration treaty of 1908, which
bound Canada only with Canadian concurrence, extending thus the
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principle far beyond matters of trade. Nevertheless, in the drafting of
the Declaration of London of 1909 (covering contraband and neutral trade
in time of war, a result of the 1907 Hague Conference) the dominions
were not consulted; and some dominion statesmen brooded. Thus,
though Canada in 1910 legislated for itself over a fishery dispute with
America, the 19 11 Imperial Conference witnessed more than Ward’s
discontent. Australia protested at the failure to consult the dominions,
and suggested, without pressing, direct communication between them and
the Foreign Office. Canada differed: consultation. Sir Wilfred Laurier
seems to have felt, would argue commitment, and commitment was exactly
what French-Canadians would refuse. Nevertheless, in spite of Asquith’s
non possumus, some steps were taken. It was decided that in future the
dominions would be consulted over the instructions to delegates to con-
ferences, and over the signature of agreements which might concern
them; while upon other international agreements, if time and circum-
stances permitted, their views would also be invited. The assembled
statesmen were then given by the Foreign Secretary an intimate and com-
prehensive view of the subject-matter of European diplomacy which sent
them home, having created a Committee of Imperial Defence, thinking
furiously — not so much about the elasticity of the British constitution as
about trouble to come.
The development of consultation was to be marked by hesitations,
contradictions and nervous withdrawals. No one, it seems, can have
suspected the total implications of the word; or measured against the
brute facts of international relations a theory which involved all the
circumlocutory possibilities of the sequence Foreign Secretary or Cabinet
to Colonial Office (Dominions branch) to Governor or Governor-General
to dominion Prime Minister and Cabinet and back again. The brute facts
proclaimed themselves in the summer of 1914, when the dominions found
themselves at war, without motion of their own, as completely and
unequivocally as if their autonomy had reached no farther than that of
the Isle of Wight. Paradox, however, is always round the comer. The
war, begun in what might be described as so constitutionally reactionary
a way, itself turned out to be a singular constitutional forcing ground.
For the empire that seemed to calculating outside observers to be on the
point of dissolution proved to have extraordinary powers of coherence,
a tough inner spirit capable of creating new institutions according to its
needs. Those needs brought dominion prime ministers to London, where
their membership of the Imperial War Cabinet made consultation im-
mediate and effective. So great was the success of this experiment, and so
lively the feelings of unity that the common effort aroused, that, when
the war-time Imperial Conference of 1917 met, there was general deter-
mination that somehow this happy state must be continued in time of
peace. The dominions must be fully recognised as ‘autonomous nations
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of an Imperial Commonwealth’. At a later conference the theory of an
empire in which unity and autonomy had been so markedly reconciled
must be somehow reshaped in accordance with reality.
But what was the nature of reality? It appears that even then there were
different interpretations — that Massey from New Zealand, for instance,
had been impressed chiefly by the unity possible in the midst of autonomy,
Sir Robert Borden from Canada by the autonomy possible in the midst of
unity; and Massey as politician was no more conservative than Borden.
It was Borden who insisted that the dominions, having devoted themselves
so unrelentingly to the purposes of war, and been consulted so freely,
be consulted as freely in the making of peace; that dominion leaders could
not simply trail subordinate in a British delegation, but must have an
independent status of their own. Could the importance conceded to the
lesser European countries be denied to these dominions? Could Smuts,
who spoke the language of a new and better world, and was listened to,
be ignored ; could the astute and obstinate Australian Hughes be ignored?
So dominion Prime Ministers signed the Treaty of Versailles, as somehow
British, but also independent, negotiators; so their countries became
members in their own right of the League of Nations created by that
anomalous instrument. There seemed, to other people, to be a sort of
gross cynicism about these proceedings, perfidiousness in Albion as ever;
for were they not merely a means of gaining Britain five votes in the world
parliament instead of one? They were not, but, to Europeans whose theories
of sovereignty were logical and tight, to Americans whose continental
federal system issued in a single foreign policy, the disclaimers might well
seem hollow though bland. It was difficult for others to understand a
system which many in Britain and in the dominions themselves tended to
regard as dangerous nonsense; which was anyhow highly dubious in law;
which was, as we can now see, merely constitutional work in progress.
Nevertheless, irretraceable steps had been taken. New Zealand might
refuse to accept the mandate for western Samoa except through a channel
provided by the United Kingdom; Sir John Salmond, that extremely able
constitutional lawyer, might return to New Zealand from the Washington
Conference in 1922 insisting that the empire had undergone no essential
change; but Canada and South Africa, at least, were quite convinced that
a new status existed, and that it should continue to exist, and that British
statesmen should not be allowed to forget it. And, by a miracle of con-
venience, this status seemed to provide a solution, at last, for the problem
of Ireland.
The constitutional conference that had been expected after the war was
not held. There were too many conferences, too many problems; and
for the British government the most desperate problem was Ireland.
Ireland was not a part of the Commonwealth at all, except in so far as
it was part of a United Kingdom that was part of the Commonwealth:
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except in so far as it was itself a ‘mother-country’, losing its sons and
daughters to build up dominions and colonies overseas. In an empire
those exiles did their best to be a disruptive force. The history of Ireland
as a colony was a thing for academic specialists; what mattered to the great
body of the Irish was their history as a subject race. In the first decade of
the twentieth century they seemed at last to be issuing from that black
period, with the promise of Home Rule from a Liberal government
dependent on Irish National support; and Home Rule seemed to be
realised in the enactment of 1914. But in Ulster there were Unionists pre-
pared to rebel rather than to accept that Act; there were army officers
prepared to resign their commissions rather than put down rebellion; and
the importation of arms into Ulster was followed by the landing of arms
in Dublin Bay and the organisation of the Irish Volunteers. European war
reduced all this to small proportions in general feeling, so that the Easter
Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, led by a small number of men deliberately
offering up their ‘blood sacrifice’ to revivify Ireland, shocked their con-
temporaries and the English alike. Guerilla warfare broke out in 1919 and
was savage on both sides, and was not brought to an end by the Govern-
ment of Ireland Act of 1920, which partitioned the country into the six
counties of Northern Ireland and the twenty-six of the rebels, with separate
parliaments to control local affairs and a sort of federal relationship to
Westminster. Only after the opening of the northern parliament in June
1921 did Lloyd George abandon the hope of reducing Ireland to quietude
by force, and the rebels consent to a truce, sending to London the delega-
tion that, under the threat of ‘immediate and terrible war’, accepted the
treaty of 6 December. This treaty was approved by the Dail Eireann (the
‘assembly of Ireland’) and the Irish Free State came into existence, to be
riven by a civil war imposed by the non-compromisers. But the new govern-
ment was determined, and the country settled down for ten years to some
sort of economic reconstruction, without violent disturbances of its
theoretical constitutional position.
The treaty, however, did not prove to have solved the problem. For the
Irish wanted clear definition, and that they could not be given in anything
short of a republic. The real problem was the nature of their association
with the Commonwealth. To well-wishing Commonwealth statesmen like
General Smuts the solution seemed to lie in ‘Dominion status’, wherein,
they held, lay all the constitutional flexibility the individual Dominions
could wish for. But the other dominions did not have Ireland’s history,
and historically dominion status implied a close and willing association
with Britain, a positive natural desire for the British connection. This was
precisely what the Irish did not have. They had been invited to London
to ‘ ascertain how the association of Ireland with the community of nations
known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish nationalist
aspirations’ ; but it was the association with England that concerned them,
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and they were too well aware of the connotations of the word ‘Empire’ —
a word that exerted its own tyranny. Nor has it been easy for any state not
a dominion ever to feel quite sure of the virtues of dominion status. What
they proposed at the treaty negotiations was, then, their own prescription
of ‘external association’ — that is, absolute sovereignty in internal affairs,
and association with Britain in external matters of common concern:
Ireland, in fact, a republic outside the Empire but associated with it. It was
this proposition that outraged the English political doctrinaire, for whom
the symbols of sovereignty — common loyalty to the crown, recognition
of the king as head of the state acting through a governor-general
appointed by him, an oath of allegiance from members of an Irish parlia-
ment — still had a final value. It was these symbols that the Irish doctrinaire
could not stomach: they made him the subject of an alien power, a man
under dominion rather than the citizen of a dominion. Meanwhile where
lay the truth, in the proceedings of every day? The Irish Free State was
given the same constitutional status as ‘the Dominion of Canada, the
Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand and the
Union of South Africa’, with more special reference to Canada: ‘the law,
practice and constitutional usage governing the relationship of the Crown
and of the Imperial Parliament to the Dominion of Canada shall govern
their relationship to the Irish Free State’. But what, again, was that law,
practice and constitutional usage? What, to repeat, was the nature of
reality? Certainly, if one were to judge from history, ‘dominion status’
could not be deemed to be static. Was its secret, then, development? And,
if development, how far and how fast could it be allowed to develop? Was
there, in fact, any theoretical limit, or might ‘law, practice and con-
stitutional usage’ be in the end a sort of floating figment, ‘a cloud that’s
dragonish’?
While such questions stirred uneasily in a number of minds, Canada
affirmed its national opinion by negotiating a treaty with the United States
for the protection of the North Pacific halibut fishery, signed at Washing-
ton by a Canadian minister alone, without the intervention of a British
ambassador. This led to discussion at the Imperial Conference of 1923
about the mode of negotiating treaties, whence came general agreement
over principles of consultation or information, whether the United King-
dom or a dominion should be primarily concerned. This in its turn was
followed, within a year, by entire forgetfulness on the British part to
consult the dominions over the Treaty of Lausanne; and the month of
June 1924 saw almost simultaneously the Canadian Prime Minister re-
asserting the broken principle, and the Irish Free State dispatching its
own minister to Washington. This latter step, an important one, though
it again gave pause to the uneasy, was followed shortly by Canada;
followed too, as convenience dictated, by the other dominions, in America,
Europe and the Far East ; so that in twenty years each one of them had
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its miniature Diplomatic List, and its problem of training young persons
for the diplomatic life. In the meantime the uneasy were still further
disturbed; and in 1926 a number of arguments were carried to London
for settlement at the Imperial Conference of that year — the post-war
constitutional conference at last, much more complicated than had seemed
likely in 1917.
Constitutional advance within the Commonwealth (a term it was now
becoming the habit to use) had been traditionally led by Canada. Canada
was still advancing, but had at this stage been joined by the Irish Free
State and South Africa. Each, or a considerable party in each, was deeply
concerned about its status. The Irish found it impossible to reconcile their
interpretation of their new dominion autonomy with treaty limitations.
In South Africa the hegemony exercised for so long by Botha and then
Smuts had been overthrown by the Nationalists — for whom, it seems, it
was very necessary to assert the right of South Africa to secede from the
Empire if it so wished. Party feelings were displayed more noisily over the
design of a new South African flag, and the manner of flying it, a con-
troversy which issued naturally enough from the thoroughgoing national-
ism of the Union. The Commonwealth, or the Empire, could stand any
number of flags, but could it admit secession? Canada had more than one
trouble. In politics it had experienced a first-class crisis, and in law a
serious rebuff. The crisis concerned the governor-general’s prerogative.
Had that personage still, when advised by his prime minister to dissolve
parliament, a right to discretionary refusal, or was he bound to obey?
Lord Byng, by refusing a dissolution to one minister and granting it to
another, outraged Mackenzie King, who had been denied — and who de-
nounced such procedure as a blow at the very heart of dominion freedom,
a return to colonialism, a jeopardising of all the fruits of constitutional
progress. For, if Canadian autonomy was real, then the Governor-
General’s prerogative, his discretion to bind or loose, could be no more
real that that of the king in Great Britain. (The true measure of constitu-
tional advance is indicated by the subsequent controversy, which centred
not on any difference of degree in prerogative, but on whether the king
himself had discretion or not.) In the legal sphere, feelings, though less
excited, were no less upset. The issue arose on a criminal case, Nadan v. the
King, carried on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
A Canadian act of 1888 had purported to abolish appeal to the Privy
Council in criminal cases. The Privy Council now declared this abolition
void: first, because appeals were regulated by the Judicial Committee
Acts of 1833 and 1844 — British legislation — and abolition by a Canadian
act infringed the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865; while, secondly, if
that famous measure were not enough, the Canadian Act assumed extra-
territorial power, which the Privy Council would not concede. Canadian
laws, or the laws of any other dominion, could have force only within the
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dominion which enacted them; they could not affect a court elsewhere
domiciled. So — concluded Canadian lawyers — Canadian justice was to be
determined ultimately not by Canadian laws in Canadian courts, but by
a clutter of transatlantic anachronisms, applied by transatlantic judges
whose regime many Canadians disliked. The load of discontents was
enough to ensure that that Imperial Conference of 1926 would not escape
some difficult constitutional thinking. It is notable that Australia, New
Zealand and Newfoundland had registered no dismay. Sensitive states-
men — one may instance Smuts in South Africa and Amery in England —
had already been grappling with the problems both of principle and of
formulation.
The celebrated Conference set up an ‘Inter-Imperial Relations Com-
mittee’ with a celebrated dialectician as its chairman. But it took the
Committee a fortnight’s hard work, as well as all the subtlety of Lord
Balfour, to arrive at the point where it ‘readily defined’ the ‘position and
mutual relation of the group of self-governing communities composed of
Great Britain and the Dominions’ — which had, ‘as regards all vital
matters, reached its full development’. Italicised by a printer’s mistake
but none the less of singular importance, the definition proceeded. Its
members were ‘‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal
in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their
domestic or internal affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the
Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of
Nations'. But, the report went on, the principles of equality and similarity,
appropriate to status, did not universally extend to function. Diplomacy
and defence demanded flexible machinery. The committee had endeavoured
not only to state political theory, but to apply it to the common needs;
that is, two aspects of what we may now, following the custom of the
’twenties, call ‘dominion status’, the domestic and the external — or, per-
haps, status looked at from within the Commonwealth and from outside
it — were both to be considered.
On the domestic side administrative, legislative and judicial forms
admittedly were out of date. It was easy enough to alter the royal title now
that Ireland was no longer part of a United Kingdom. ‘His Majesty’s
Government in Great Britain’ certainly had now no wish to impose the
Judicial Committee on any of His Majesty’s governments elsewhere. As
for the governor-general, the committee could but generalise. The
governor-general, certainly no longer the agent of the imperial govern-
ment, personally represented the king, holding the same constitutional
position (with, one assumes, whatever duties attached) as that held by the
king in Great Britain: and it was accordingly thought fit that henceforth
communication between government and government should be direct,
and not through the royal representative. What should be done about the
legislative power of the dominions it was less easy to say, though some
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things were obvious, and expert legal examination was recommended. In
the sphere of external relations there was further definition of treaty-
making procedure, and of dominion representation at international con-
ferences — the general intent of which was that any dominion might have
its own plenipotentiaries commissioned by the king on the advice of its
own government. ‘It was frankly recognised’ that in foreign policy, as in
defence — matters of ‘function’ — responsibility mainly rested, and must
for some time continue to rest, with ‘His Majesty’s Government in Great
Britain’. Nevertheless, as practically all the dominions were involved in
some foreign relations, it was felt that neither they nor Great Britain could
be committed to active obligations except with the definite assent of their
own governments. And, indeed, none of the dominions was committed
to the guarantee of French or German frontiers which Britain had given
under the Treaty of Locarno. The appointment of dominion ministers in
foreign capitals was approved, with the proviso that in their absence
existing diplomatic channels should be used. But what of day-to-day
consultations between His Majesty’s government in Great Britain and His
Majesty’s governments elsewhere? Failing the Governor-General, some
other functionary would have to be instituted.
The Prime Ministers separated with varying degrees of cheerfulness.
The famous italicised formula gave pleasure in Canada and South Africa,
where it, and the deductions drawn from it, seemed to concede with
reasonable adequacy the main points then claimed by those communities —
though certainly nothing had been said about secession. In Ireland pleasure
depended on willingness to compromise; and still the emphasis of equality
and free association went hand-in-hand with a common allegiance to the
crown — a crown that was, to quote later Irish Prime Ministers, ‘anathema
in Ireland’, and a crown (in more personal terms) worn by ‘an alien king’.
Nor was Ireland altogether satisfied with any theoretical limit on equality
of function. In the other dominions satisfaction was not marked. New-
foundland, small in population and resources, could hardly make an effect
in constitutional controversy, but neither Australia nor New Zealand was
prepared at that moment for further advance into the doubtful region of
autonomy, and New Zealand was indeed alarmed. To this dominion, in its
colonial days so critical of British policy, Canadian, Irish and South
African behaviour seemed to invoke the disruption of the Empire. Dis-
trusting the new term Commonwealth, it wished neither for plenipoten-
tiaries nor for political theory; into the proceedings of the next five years
its political leaders were drawn with reluctance, and to the great enactment
which was the culminating point of those proceedings, and indeed of the
whole legal development of responsible government, it was stubbornly
opposed.
That enactment was the Statute of Westminster, 1931. It was the logical
result of the further consideration of administrative, legislative and judicial
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forms which the 1926 Committee had seen to be necessary — consideration
given by the experts of the Conference on the Operation of Dominion
Legislation and Merchant Shipping Legislation which met at London in
1929. It did not touch the Privy Council, however, except by implication;
what the experts were concerned with were the limits on the legislative
competence of the dominion parliaments — limits which had been imposed
by, and did not exist for, the imperial parliament; limits which must be
abolished if equality of status was to be real. These limits were drawn
partly in the statutes by which the dominions had gained their constitu-
tions, or in other statutes which by particular wording affected them;
partly (as Canada had found) in that other fundamental statute, the
Colonial Laws Validity Act, 1865; and partly in the obscure doctrine of
extra-territoriality. There had been further limits on colonial autonomy,
reaching far back into the history of imperial expansion, but these had
disappeared in the process of conventional change. Under statute, for
example, the crown could (except in the case of the Irish Free State) dis-
allow dominion legislation — though such power had not been exercised
since 1873 ; and statute provided for ‘reservation’, discretionary or obliga-
tory, by a governor — that is, the withholding of his assent to a bill until
the sanction of Whitehall should be obtained. Discretionary reservation
had lapsed; obligatory reservation in some cases remained. Under the
Colonial Laws Validity Act no dominion legislature could thrust aside
these limits, even as no dominion legislature could (for instance) abolish
appeals to the Judicial Committee; so that not merely was an abstract
equality undermined but there was practical inconvenience. As for extra-
territoriality, legal learning conflicted both as to the existence of the
limitation and as to its extent. Something would undoubtedly have to be
done to bring certainty into such spheres of law as fisheries, shipping,
air navigation, marriage; while dominion shipping was affected still by
imperial legislation. The Conference saw no way of removing the mass of
anomalies except through an act of parliament at Westminster, and
punctuated its report with draft clauses.
The draft clauses, discussed again at the Imperial Conference of 1930,
were referred to the individual legislatures, who added further clauses to
conciliate Canadian provinces and Australian states, always touchy over
suspected federal aggrandisement; and in December 1931 the Act was
passed. Like many statutes of profound constitutional importance, it
does not illustrate by the nobility of its language or the rhythms of its
prose its quite remarkable place in the development of an empire: as an
application of a political theory which might well have exploited the
combined eloquence of a Burke, a Chatham and a Fox, it was indeed
remarkably flat. Its importance is not that of the memorable phrase but
of the memorable deed. It is the final fracturing of the sovereignty of a
centralised empire, with the remains of which unhappy legal conception
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the constitutional lawyers — confronted with the spectacle of one king
advised by a multiplicity of governments — had to do their best. The very
title of the act was significant: ‘An Act to give effect to certain resolutions
passed by Imperial Conferences held in the years 1926 and 1930.’ It
annulled for the dominions the Colonial Laws Validity Act, and declared
the power of any dominion parliament to make laws having extra-terri-
torial operation; it did away with all reservation; it declared that no
future act passed at Westminster should apply to any dominion, unless
a clause therein expressly stated that enactment had been requested and
consented to by that dominion. The Canadian, Australian and New
Zealand constitution acts were, at the request of those countries, excepted
from the operations of the Statute. Australia, New Zealand and New-
foundland were excepted, indeed, altogether from the operation of the
Statute until they should choose to adopt it through their own legislatures;
so that loosing and binding were both voluntary. But how odd and
irregular is constitutional development ! It was in the year of the Statute
that Australia, which held back from the operation of the Statute,
took advantage of new procedure in the appointment of a governor-
general to become the first dominion to elevate a native son to that post : for
though, it was agreed in 1930, the governor-general represented the king,
he must be appointed by the king on the advice of responsible ministers,
and those ministers must be the ministers of the dominion concerned.
This convention was as damaging to the old theory of empire as any
statute could be. But before long the first fruits of the Statute of West-
minster appeared in the abolition by Canada and the Irish Free State of
appeals to the Privy Council ; while South Africa, with a milder approach,
opened its campaign by doing away with disallowance.
The peculiarity of the Commonwealth relationship, indeed, may be
measured on the one hand by the Irish move outwards, and on the other
by the fate which in 1934 overtook Newfoundland. That unhappy child
of circumstance, smitten by economic depression as well as irresponsible
administration, then saw no alternative to putting itself into the hands of
receivers. Its relinquishment of dominion status was designed to be a
temporary measure; in fact, having after some years of government by
commission become again solvent, it found its post-war constitutional des-
tiny not in resumption of its place as a dominion but in incorporation as a
province of Canada (in 1 949) . Meanwhile separateness was mitigated by other
facts of Commonwealthlife. Whatever the difficulties of regular consultation,
information could be given, and the flow of information from the centre to
the perimeter and back again steadily increased in volume. The governor-
general, decorating a formal niche, was superseded as government
representative in his dominion by a high commissioner for the United
Kingdom (the first such official had in fact gone to Ottawa in 1928); and,
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though there was less business done directly between dominion govern-
ments, it was found useful for some of them to be politically represented
in one another’s capitals also. Thus each dominion was building up a sort
of diplomatic pattern for itself, a reflection of its own needs, without
doctrinaire extension, both inside and outside the Commonwealth. Inside
the Commonwealth, as a sort of test case both of fundamental theory and
of procedure, men studied the constitutional history of the Abdication of
King Edward VIII in 1936 ; for with divided sovereignty and a multiplicity
of advisers, on an issue which connoted emotion, it was important to steer
opinion and legislation all the same way. The machinery worked; and the
Commonwealth was spared the embarrassment of more than one monarch.
The British, though they may be a self-governing people, are also a
conferring people. Nothing could be more striking, sometimes, than the
determination of this fragmented and disparate empire, or the greater
part of it, to work out a common policy; just as sometimes nothing could
be more striking than the determination of the individuals to go their own
way; so that to the outside observer the whole presents the perpetual
possibility of surprise, or of annoyance. Annoyance came from the Ottawa
Conference of 1932. It is interesting to mark the diverse implications of
the latest great revolution in British fiscal policy, the abandonment of
free trade under the impact of the Great Depression, and of that previous
revolution, the abandonment of protection nearly ninety years earlier.
For while free trade came before the colonies were their own masters
yet left them virtually at liberty to adopt what fiscal policy they liked —
was part, even, of the foundation of their political freedom — the later
event seemed to those same colonies, their autonomy sealed and blessed,
almost the return of a prodigal mother to the home. Was not there, at last,
to be introduced that system of Imperial Preference which had gilded the
colonial fancy three decades before, to pursue which Chamberlain had
abandoned office, which now, in an unstable world, might shore up the
staggering Commonwealth? The Ottawa Conference did not redeem these
high hopes, and the eloquence which played round that not very exactly
defined concept, ‘ the spirit of Ottawa died away from a stage that was
being set for a different and more agonising performance. For the Ottawa
agreements, though they marked a considerable degree of determination
to work out a joint economic policy, and though they did materially help
certain groups — for instance, the coffee-growers of Kenya — were essen-
tially opposed to the greatest possible recovery of world trade. The best
that could be argued for them as a whole, perhaps, was that, as it seemed
beyond the competence, or goodwill, of men to organise a rational econo-
mic system for the world, it was at least preferable to organise rationally
a smaller unit than to concede general chaos. But there could be no large
economic salvation for Britain merely in the empire, and the economic life
of the dominions had become so elaborated with industry that British
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manufacturers, who were to have been encouraged, not infrequently felt
rebuffed instead. Nor did the Australian and New Zealand producer of
butter and meat feel more confident that his problems had been solved.
The return of prosperity came with a world return ; and there were critics
who held that that return was impeded by the manful though not single-
minded efforts of the statesmen of 1932. At least the historian may con-
template with some interest the process, without being involved too deeply
in economic hypothesis.
This Ottawa Conference, with its underlying conception of an empire
closing its ranks against the outside world, could not help implying a
general foreign policy. Nevertheless, as the decade advances, what claims
attention is again separateness. Or, to be more precise, as the international
situation became more and more violently complicated and European
politics more and more charged with doom, we see the dominions more
and more struggling to work out their own foreign policies, which would
reconcile their national interests with some sort of responsibility to civilisa-
tion in general ; and at the same time, or perhaps alternatively, to maintain
as a permanent and desirable thing the power and unity of the British
association. This individuality might be the expression of a traditional
attitude, as with Canada’s reluctance to become caught in foreign entangle-
ments; or it might be due to the emergence, with change of government,
of strong personalities with convictions on international morality, as in
New Zealand; or to the Australian realisation that potential markets and
potential danger lay in the north; and in any case it went with a deter-
mination to scrutinise the foreign policy of the United Kingdom with care
before giving it support. Naturally, in the mid-’thirties, dominion repre-
sentatives found the League of Nations at once a peg for policy and a
platform for its enunciation. They were certainly not dragged in the
English wake; they reached their own conclusions about the application
of sanctions to Italy during her Ethiopian adventure. In a time when
collective security was greatly talked about and little heeded, when in
1936 the reform of the League was being considered, with no general
determination either to reform it or to stand by it, Australia declared for
automatic sanctions, economic and financial, and for regional pacts of
mutual assistance; New Zealand and South Africa believed in taking the
Covenant literally; while Canada deprecated the idea of force, or the
notion that the League’s central purpose was to maintain the status quo,
and suggested the perfecting of the machinery of mediation and concilia-
tion. They were all struggling against forces that took little account of
dominion sentiments on collective security, or morality; in the last dread-
ful crises they fell silent; and in due course the blood of their sons and
daughters was spilt.
Almost six years of hostilities completed, for the dominions, the asser-
tion of their international status; some of them made independent declara-
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tions of war, and in 1 939 South Africa decided only after war and neutrality
had hung for some days in the balance. Constitutionally even more deci-
sive, perhaps, was the neutrality of Eire. Eire: it is a new name, and an
Irish name. We may look once more at Ireland. While the six northern
counties clung with grim devotion to their union with England, the division
between England and the Free State had steadily widened. It was a division
different in kind, because different in feeling, from the widening autonomy
of the other Commonwealth partners; for it entailed successive unilateral
denunciations of the treaty of 1921, and there was no effective objection
that Britain could possibly make. In 1932 de Valera, a survivor of 1916,
and the Fianna Fail had come to power, and remaining in power for
sixteen years applied themselves to a programme that was national both
politically and economically. In 1937 a new constitution, drafted by
de Valera, was ratified by plebiscite: there was now ‘a sovereign, indepen-
dent democratic State’ called Eire; the governor-general had become an
elected President, the oath of allegiance had become an oath of loyalty
to the state. There was not yet a republic. While the country stood aloof
from the abdication crisis, it was still prepared to use the new king as a
constitutional convenience, for the one purpose of accrediting its diplo-
matic representatives abroad. Somehow the government of the United
Kingdom was able to persuade itself that all this did not mean a funda-
mental alteration in the Irish position — i.e. that Eire remained a dominion;
and the other dominions were able to agree. But was not this the triumph,
in fact, of the concept of ‘external association’ brought forward, and so
signally rebuffed, in 1921? In 1938 Britain handed back to Eire the ‘naval
ports’ over which it had retained control since the treaty; but, amid the
darkening international scene, de Valera forecast Irish neutrality as long
as partition lasted. At least the neutrality, though it had some bitter
consequences for Britain, was a friendly one; and, though it was regarded
as an unhappy stand by the remainder of the Commonwealth, it was
respected. The scrupulous respect exercised, above all, by the United
Kingdom made plain as nothing else could the reality of autonomy. The
Irish problem was not even then ‘ solved ’ : Eire could not by now reconcile
its national freedom, its peculiar sovereignty, either with status as a
dominion, or with the tenuous bond of external association. It was not
a member of the Commonwealth, said its spokesman, in 1947, when the
war was over. Then what was it? Within two more years the final, com-
pulsive, explicit step was taken, unimpeded by any of those who thereby
ceased to be its partners. Nothing could more clearly register the change
in the idea of empire over fifty years than the difference in the British
attitude to the South African Republic in 1899 and the Republic of
Ireland in 1949. 1 To confuse in words the issue, to baffle a tight consti-
tutional logic as it had been baffled over the very beginnings of responsible
1 Or, if we look ahead, to the Republic of South Africa, also seceding, in 1961.
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government and colonial autonomy in the mid-nineteenth century, India
had just, in 1948, given itself a republican constitution, and as a declared
republic remained a member of the Commonwealth.
The war forced both Australia and New Zealand into greater legal
autonomy. Australia found it necessary to put the powers of the Common-
wealth beyond dispute by adopting the Statute of Westminster in 1942;
New Zealand, after being entangled in complications which were a crown
lawyer’s nightmare, finally took the step in 1947. Dominions, too, were
thrown into what was almost a new sense of geography, and what was
certainly a new outlook on strategy, by the war’s very course. Canada,
besides sending an army to England and Europe, found itself interlocked
with the United States in an Arctic strategy ; Australia and New Zealand,
with Singapore gone and the British navy vanished from the Pacific, found
themselves interlocked with the United States in an oceanic strategy. Only
South Africa found its traditional strategic position unchanged, with its
interest in the Suez Canal, and its midway position, by a different route,
between England and the East. For the others, this American interlocking
gave new modes of ‘consultation’, with Washington sometimes the centre
rather than London; or remoteness from England stimulated a greater
sense of regional burdens, so that it was natural for the two Pacific
dominions to work out their own Australian-New Zealand Agreement of
1944, the so-called ‘Canberra pact’, which insisted not only on a future
common defence, but on common responsibility for the welfare of the
island groups. They, it is notable, and none of the great powers, brought
into existence the South Pacific Commission, with its accent on a new and
more knowledgeable trusteeship. Nor is it unworthy of remark that after
the war the British representative on the Allied Council in Japan — a rather
powerless body, to be sure — was no English general or diplomatist, but
an Australian. This was an autonomy and a co-operation undreamed of
even in 1939. And still, amid the wreck and the reclamation of financial
systems, as western Europe fought for stability, the process of consulta-
tion went on, the feeding of Britain proceeded; while once again the
dominions, so different from the colonies of the nineteenth century, never-
theless began to think in terms of population and of labour, of new experi-
ments in migration, of new adventures in industrialisation.
The dominions? Some of them were beginning to balk, to be restive,
at the use of that convenient word. Was there in even it, for tender minds,
some subtle angularity? With Canada the term dated from 1867, with
New Zealand from 1907. 1 Did it carry with it, in spite of all that had passed,
1 Changes in susceptibility are nicely balanced by changes in the administrative organisa-
tion of Whitehall. In 1907 the Colonial Office produced a Dominions Department. In 1925
this became the Dominions Office with a separate Secretary of State for the Dominions. In
1947 a further change of name resulted in the Commonwealth Relations Office, and a
Secretary for Commonwealth Relations : and in these, within a few months, were absorbed
the India Office and the Secretary of State for India.
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the shadow, almost imperceptible but lingering, of the equality of status
that was not equality of function? Had the ‘ group of self-governing com-
munities ’ of 1926 really ‘reached its full development’ in that year? In
fifty years, indeed, the whole world-entangled British complex had changed,
in the facts and the philosophy of its construction, in its general policies
and its general economics, in its social structure and its social relations —
had changed so much that nothing that could happen to it in the future
could be more surprising or more paradoxical than its past. But then were
not the paradoxes logical after all?
To the consideration of this development must be added consideration
of the colonies of what was still reckoned in the 1940s and 1950s as the
dependent empire — a history exceedingly complicated and as interesting
as that of the sovereign dominions. For, if the older dominions may be
looked at from an agreed basis of objectivity whence passion has departed,
the controversy that attends the relations of dominating and dominated
societies has not ceased to brood over those entities, recently colonies and
dependencies, that have come later to responsible government and indepen-
dence. There was, in the middle of the century, much difference between
Ceylon, which had, in 1948, become independent within the Common-
wealth, and the communities of East and West Africa; Ceylon’s constitu-
tional problem, thus solved, was very different from that of Malaya or of
the West Indies. Yet, no less than among the partners of the old Common-
wealth, the history is one of government on a changing basis of social and
economic life that produced a nationalism as fervent as anything in the
history of Canada or Australia. It was more fervent, indeed; for the
nationalism of the older dominions was a British or a European national-
ism, not Asian or African ; it presented no alien tradition or difference of
colour. The changing relations between colonies and imperial centre were
now complicated by precisely these things, just as nationalism itself was
complicated by differences of language or of tribe. Superimposed on such
traditions and such differences, and eagerly grasped, were the political
institutions and parliamentary practice of Britain. It was a superimposition
which came quite late and very suddenly.
In all this the overmastering fact is the poverty of the colonial peoples,
though it was not for poverty but for the potentiality of wealth that
adventurers first toiled up their rivers and through their forests; and
certainly wealth has been extracted from them. Or, as in the West Indies,
they exchanged outright slavery for slavery to world economics, and, while
demand for their products fell, saw their population increased beyond the
likelihood of providing for it at home. Thus, whether a colony were old or
recently acquired, and whatever its administration, the spectacle it pre-
sented was almost always one of quite inadequate subsistence agriculture
on soil of diminishing fertility for the overwhelming majority of its people;
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or it might, as in East Africa, be that of a nomadic pastoralism. Not quite
always; for in some cases a single crop for export revolutionised material
life and involved its diversification, as cocoa did on the Gold Coast of
Africa; or cotton and co-operative marketing might change for better the
life of large areas of Uganda. Alternatively, mining by European com-
panies, for copper in Northern Rhodesia or gold in — one need not look
only at Africa — the mandated territory of New Guinea, might, in draining
off male population, both complicate and impoverish the pattern of village
life, without increasing real material prosperity. Poverty meant lack of
community services — health, education, agricultural researchand organisa-
tion, communications. Even where things were best, the basic conditions
most favourable, as in Nigeria or the Gold Coast of Africa, the problems
were enormous; where they were worst, as in the East African Protectorate,
the twentieth-century model of the ‘ colony of exploitation ’, English planta-
tion owners prospered only at the expense of a native population dis-
possessed of fertile soil. The generalisations are not altered essentially by
the significance of particular colonial exports in the world’s economy or
by scientific methods of agriculture — by the fact that the plantations of
Malaya, for example, produced before the second world war half the
world’s rubber and half its tin. For the 60 million people in British colonial
or mandated territories at the outset of that war (of whom 80 per cent
were in Africa) the Statute of Westminster, 1931, was certainly void of
meaning.
On this material basis were worked out two conceptions of great im-
portance for British colonial policy, that of the ‘dual mandate’ and that
of ‘indirect rule’. The first, the twentieth-century variant of the idea of
the ‘white man’s burden’, is prior logically though not chronologically to
the second. On the imperial power, it argues, is laid a double burden: to
see that the government of subject native peoples, and the development
of the natural resources of their territories, are directed to the best interests
of those peoples; and to see that in this process those natural resources
are not denied to the world. The double burden is a double trusteeship.
The conception was criticised as hypocritical, or at best an attempt to
reconcile incompatibles. Certainly it rested on the assumptions that in the
last analysis the governing power knew better than the governed peoples
what was for their good, and that there was a sort of moral duty laid on
those peoples to produce raw materials for the use of economically more
advanced societies. But, granted that no indigenous people in any part of
the world could hold off in perpetuity the agents of an alien economic life,
however inimical that life was to the first principles of their own, the new
conception had something to it. It was certainly an advance on naked
exploitation: there was no inherent reason why administrators should be
merely the agents of hypocrisy.
The ‘dual mandate’ received its classic exposition from one whose
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practice was fundamental also to the development of indirect rule, Lord
Lugard , 1 though Lugard was by no means a sole discoverer. Thirty years
earlier Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon had worked on the same principle in
Fiji; contemporary with Lugard was Sir William McGregor in Papua;
the Germans in New Guinea, the Dutch in the East Indies, acted similarly.
Indeed any colonial power, faced with responsibilities large in area and
population, and small administrative resources of its own, was almost
driven to some such solution to its problem. But it was certainly the
Nigeria of Lugard and his successors that attracted most attention as a
shining example. As a young soldier Lugard had been instrumental in
the acquisition and pacification of much of Nigeria, where his great talent
for administration, first awakened in East Africa, fastened on the possi-
bilities of ruling through native agencies and institutions — throwing re-
sponsibility, or continuing it, where it had traditionally been, and placing
on the officers of the British colonial service the tasks of general super-
vision, of advice, and superior justice, together with policy-making for the
territorial area as a whole. ‘Territorial area’: for Nigeria consisted of a
small coastal ‘colony’ where direct rule was carried on, and a vast hinter-
land, a ‘protectorate’: as did the Gold Coast, colony and protectorate,
on a smaller scale, and the colony and protectorate of Sierra Leone.
(Nor was the dichotomy confined to West Africa: a little later there
was in East Africa the colony and protectorate of Kenya ; the British South
Africa Company was responsible both for the colony of Southern Rhodesia
and the protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland ; and theremight
be protectorates without a colony, like Uganda.) ‘Territorial area’, again,
rather than native nation, or exclusive congeries of tribes or identical peoples
or language groups ; for the scramble for Africa had not resulted in terri-
torial divisions that paid much attention to such things. Thus the powerful
Muslim emirates of Northern Nigeria presented a different problem from
that of the southern forest states ; but all administrative problems, given
patience and firmness, seemed amenable to indirect rule. Tribal authorities
or institutions deemed decadent could, it was held, be encouraged into
life again, or replaced ; there was no need to impose an artificial uniformity
on every part of a territory. The only uniformity was in the final sub-
jection. Whatever exercise of powers might be tolerated, encouraged or
delegated, there was a power in reserve — a power of law-making and
taxation, the power ‘ to control the exercise of such subsidiary legislative
powers as may be delegated to Native Authorities, to dispose of such lands
as are vested in the paramount Power . . . and of course to raise and control
armed forces ’. 2 The system was under certain circumstances, as with the
1 The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, first published in 1922. Lugard was not the
only man to think systematically (cf. Sir Donald Cameron’s Principles of Native Administra-
tionand Their Application, Lagos, 1935). Cameron had got indirect rule going in Tanganyika,
where he was governor, 1925-31.
* Cameron, op. cit. p. 24.
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northern emirates, capable of brilliant success. It seemed equally successful
in Uganda, where again there were strong native rulers. It could be or
seem to be successful in places where indigenous authority had been less
centralised or less stable : wherever there was some tribal authority, in fact,
chief or council, who could be made the embodiment of local administra-
tive and judicial powers, and be susceptible to the advice and guidance of
the British district officer. Where there was an emir in Northern Nigeria,
or a kabaka or king in Uganda, the system conferred an added authority
on these magnates, maintaining a watchful eye on their courts and treas-
uries ; elsewhere — in much of the East African protectorate territory, for
example — it was very much a system of local government.
The system elicited much praise from those who practised it, and from
many students of comparative government; and not unnaturally so. It
seemed, from the ruler’s standpoint, cheap, simple and efficient; the
premium it placed on tradition and ‘ natural loyalties ’, in conjunction with
good order, seemed admirable to the anthropologist; it had an appeal
both to the hard-headed and to the romantic. From the standpoint of
the ruling power, again, and of favourable imperial critics, it seemed to
produce its justification in the war of 1914-18; for nothing, so the argu-
ment ran, could exceed the loyalty of the Africans who fought and carried
in the campaigns both east and west, the armed and unarmed forces
raised and controlled by the paramount power in a struggle which might
seem in its origins but remotely concerned with the interests of African
tribes. There were critics less favourable, however; as the century wore
on certain disadvantages became apparent, and close students of con-
temporary African life were to think that as a constitutional safety measure
the admirable system had perhaps been overdone. Though peace and
good order were maintained, though native life was not broken up and
destroyed in the name of an efficiency, political or economic, that was
solely alien, though able chiefs were not forced into despairing idleness,
though the sanctification of stalemate was not everywhere and always
inevitable — as not a few district officers proved in the face of government
poverty; though at the worst it could be said that direct government in
such old-established colonies as the West Indies was no more enterprising
and skilful — yet in another two decades it was becoming apparent that
indirect rule had nothing to offer to the future. For no more than else-
where was life in Africa immune to change ; and the principal disadvantage
of the system was its tendency to acceptance of a status quo, however
mediocre, as a positive virtue — to the support, that is, as permanent
realities of the outward forms of tribal rule, not always understood as
what they were; to impotence in the face of economic and social change,
to the perpetuation of native vested interests, to the ignoring of the
legitimate unrest of the young; to a general lack of imagination on the
part of administrators. There was little provision for education, either
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elementary or advanced. Nevertheless there was some, with the emphasis
on education for the sons of chiefs. Education, western education, tech-
nical education, advanced education, became desperately necessary as the
century itself advanced, unless Africa was to remain, in comparison with
the rest of the world, indefinitely in an infantile state of economic, social
and political tutelage. There were enough educated Africans both to
resent this prospect and to make their resentment felt, as inevitable social
change permeated the colonies, and spread its far and fading ripples
through the protectorates. The clerk, the teacher, the journalist, the rarer
lawyer or physician, though perhaps poised uncertainly between two
cultures, had for his professional purposes little in common with the
ancient purposes of his tribe, and might respect other leaders than his
traditional ones; for him the institutions of power were, increasingly,
western institutions. He could see clearly enough how the ultimate political
power was exercised. There was therefore a paradox inherent in the whole
system of African government, frankly puzzling to the liberal student and
well-wisher of Africa. It was assumed that a united Nigeria, for example,
would one day aspire towards some form of parliamentary government;
yet for a people so backward (in western terms), so divided in religion and
culture , 4 who never knew any unity but that imposed by Britain upon this
arbitrary block of Africa, that day will be very distant ’. 1 Self-government
was taken for granted, but was it possible that the issue from the paradox
might some day be otherwise resolved?
The political traditions of Great Britain involve the assumption that self-government
implies representative parliamentary institutions, and this is held also by the majority
of educated Africans. It is implicit in the philosophy of indirect rule, however, that
the nature of the political forms which may ultimately be involved should not be
prematurely defined, and it is possible that a development deliberately based on
African institutions may lead to some new type of self governing organisation. 3
Thus went informed speculation on the eve of the second world war.
In Nigeria or the Gold Coast, meanwhile, or in Uganda or Bechuana-
land, the condition of the native peoples was a happy contrast to that of
peoples subject to the rule or the pressures of a white minority in Kenya,
however the Colonial Office strove there to impose its safeguards and its
benevolence; or of those hapless millions whose fate was being determined
by the increasingly segregationist policy and uncompromising devotion to
white supremacy of the Union of South Africa — and not white supremacy
1 Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (1937). The quotation is from p. 360
of the 1962 edition.
2 Lord Hailey, An African Survey (1938), pp. 134-5. A more forthright statement of this
attitude came a few years later from Ernest Barker, Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire
(1942): ‘African self-government as it grows must be African: it must be a thing which is
sui generis: it cannot be a mere imitation and a watery copy of European methods.’ Barker,
unlike Hailey, had no African experience ; but he was a thoughtful and sympathetic historical
and political scholar.
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only, but, within the ambit of a white culture pattern, Afrikaner supremacy.
In South Africa, it was becoming apparent, more than one British ideal
was in decline. In Kenya — the East African Protectorate of 1895, which
became the Kenya Colony in 1920 — there grew up a classic example of
racial confusion and exploitation, not resolved in the end without the
worst sort of rebellion and repression, or until a period when the change
in the aspect of protectorates and colonies was almost total. The people
of the protectorate were nomads and pastoral ; they had merely a sub-
sistence agriculture; they did not have the traditional political organisation
that would make indirect rule possible. Rational and effective administra-
tion, as well as the opening up of the country to European settlement which
seemed axiomatically desirable, depended on communications. To work
on the railway between Mombasa on the coast and Lake Victoria, Indians
were imported, and after its completion in 1903 remained. Thus were
installed the problems of the ‘plural society’. By orders-in-council of
1901-2 European settlers were offered land on favourable terms in the
fertile ‘ western highlands ’ which were transferred from U ganda to Kenya ;
and surveys for European settlement took in a great deal of land belonging
to the Kikuyu tribe, land vacant at the time not merely because the people
were nomadic but because their numbers had been reduced by smallpox.
They did not cease to regard the land as properly theirs, and as their
numbers again increased (an increase aided by peaceful government and
modem medicine) their sense of grievance grew. Nor did the Masai tribe
feel itself more justly treated. British settlers flowed in on to the best land
of the country, falling sentimentally in love with it as a home for the free
spirit, making the reputation of Kenya coffee, complaining of the lack of
labour and of the reserves where potential labour for European farms
preferred to spend its time; repeating the centuries-old pattern of the
colonist who believes himself (not entirely without reason) as the founder
of his adopted country’s economic progress, deploring the inactivity in his
interests of official persons, and demanding as of right a hand in his own
government. In 1919 and 1920 the settlers and then the Indian minority
were given elected representation in a legislative council; in 1927 the
Indian seats (nominated and elective) rose to five (the Indians refused their
co-operation for seven more years) and the Europeans to eleven, and the
Arab community had one elected member. The interests of the great
African population were represented by one nominated European,
generally a missionary. To the demand (again true to pattern) from
the settlers for an elected European majority on the council the Colo-
nial Office replied that it could not surrender authority to any elected
majority of non-Africans. It was an uneasy and unsatisfactory state of
imbalance, economic and constitutional, over which controversy raged
both in the colony and in Britain: the problems of the plural society were
multiple.
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The first world war had afflicted Britain with additional burdens under
the mandate system — problems, even though the doctrine of trusteeship
seemed to the optimistic to have enough sanction in existing practice to
minimise them in British hands. But it was one thing to deal, relatively
successfully, with Iraq and Trans- Jordan, which were not colonies at all;
it was quite another to handle Palestine — a country which was being
colonised by Jews in the face of Arab distaste, to the accompaniment of
bombs and vicious murder, and presented a problem quite insoluble in
colonial terms — a problem finally to be abandoned in 1948. The old
German colonies, on the other hand, split up among members of the
Commonwealth, could certainly be treated on traditional lines. To Britain
went German East Africa or Tanganyika (where for some years the stan-
dards of social services were lower than under the Germans) and part of
the Cameroons and Togoland in West Africa ; these, as ‘ B ’ mandates, were
virtually indistinguishable from British colonies. To South Africa went
German South West Africa — which the South Africans, with no pedantic
regard to the terms of the mandate, before long wished to incorporate
completely into the Union. To Australia went the German part of New
Guinea, which was administered until 1945 quite independently of the
adjoining Australian territory of Papua; in that year the administrations
were unified. To New Zealand went Western Samoa, the charming and
difficult people of which made clear the inadequacy, for successful govern-
ment, merely of confident good intentions. Nevertheless, under a later dis-
pensation, it was Western Samoa that was the subject of one of the first
Trusteeship agreements with the United Nations in 1947, and arrived at
independence (a non-Commonwealth independence) in 1962.
The period between the two world wars was notable for discussion and
development in both constitutional and economic spheres, discussion and
development stimulated by the depression of the ’thirties, with the sub-
sequent enquiries into the causes of misery and riot. Constitutionally, we
see some experimentation with executive and legislative councils. In Ceylon,
which among colonies may almost seem a spearhead of twentieth-century
constitutional change, where increasing popular representation had been
accorded on the legislative council since 1910, the official majority was
abolished in 1920; in 1931 adult suffrage and a measure of responsible
government were both granted. The country had a relatively high literacy
level and an able educated class, and, though it had also a latent language
problem, was without the bitter communal feuds that were to bedevil so
much of the Asian future. It embodied all the elements of a successful
unitary state. In 1920 Uganda was given both an executive and a legisla-
tive council. In 1923 the colony of Nigeria had elected members added
to its legislature. In the same year Southern Rhodesia passed from the
British South Africa Company to the crown as a self-governing colony;
there were then 34,000 whites (to whom the franchise was confined) and
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upwards of 813,000 native Africans in the colony, approximately half of
the area of which was set aside for European ownership. In 1924 Northern
Rhodesia, also ceasing to be under company control, became a pro-
tectorate. About the same time ambitious voices were raised in various
regions, where geography or economic interest seemed to justify the cause,
in favour of some common administration, of amalgamation or federa-
tion. One such scheme was for the closer union of Uganda, Kenya and
Tanganyika, a movement supported mainly by European communities
and opposed by natives and the Indian commercial minority; favoured
by the imperial government for certain limited purposes, discouraged as
a whole in the absence of sufficient guarantees of native interests. It might
be highly desirable to foster and integrate transport; but what general
economic policy could subsume that of Uganda, where the alienation of
land to Europeans was prohibited, and of Tanganyika, where European
settlement was discouraged, and of Kenya, which its settlers preferred to
regard as a white man’s colony? How could closer union be imposed
on systems of government so disparate? The outcome was an annual
Governors’ Conference, which met first in 1926. Another, for the union
of the two Rhodesias, with possibly Nyasaland added in, was considered
by a royal commission in 1927 and rejected, as it was by a second in 1939.
Amid geographical conditions quite different from those of central Africa,
the West Indies, with their queer congeries of representative and crown
colony governments, and their history of abortive federal plans, were the
scene of a developing West Indian regional consciousness; but a commis-
sion in 1932 could make no more of a scheme for federation, even on a
small scale, than could its predecessors.
In the economic sphere the great step forward of this period, one of
major social as well as economic importance, came at its end — came
indeed as a climax of much of its worried thought, at a moment when the
empire had again been plunged into world war. This step (for earlier ones
we may go back as far as Joseph Chamberlain) was an extension of the
policy of giving financial help for pressing colonial projects embodied in
the Colonial Development Fund of 1929 (from which the British Treasury
made grants to non-self-governing colonies and mandated territories) ; but
this was also designed to stimulate British trade. The Colonial Welfare
and Development Act of 1940 provided for free grants to the colonies, up
to £120 million spread out over ten years, for expenditure under approved
development plans on research, education, health and agricultural ser-
vices, training of civil servants, labour and co-operative organisation, the
development of local industries and communications — for, in fact, a
systematic overhauling and reshaping of colonial resources in men and
things. Large economic schemes were to be managed through develop-
ment corporations in each area, an Economic and Development Council
being established in London to advise the Colonial Office. Though the
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total was certainly quite inadequate for colonial needs, it was regarded
not as a discharge of liability, but rather as a mode of breaking the vicious
circle of poverty which stultified all self-help, a stimulation of potentialities
as much as a particular grant-in-aid (and, there is no doubt, as a stimula-
tion of colonial loyalties in time of war). The motive behind this new and
hopeful advance harmonised with a movement for international collabora-
tion over specific problems of trusteeship, designed to give badly needed
improvement to the old mandates system. Beyond Africa, it was this
movement that in different ways produced the Anglo-American Caribbean
Commission in 1942, with its organs the Caribbean Research Council
(which included French and Netherlands representation) and the advisory
West Indian Conference ; and, in the Pacific, the South Pacific Commission
that was initiated by Australia and New Zealand, joined by those powers
which were concerned also in the Caribbean, and inaugurated in 1947.
Here, it could be said, was some attempt to work out formulated intention
where earlier had been only wishes and vague hopes.
War, though it builds up empires, also helps to dissolve empires. The
first world war, with its common effort, had been at once a sort of climax
in imperial relations and a stimulator of great constitutional changes, so
that in 1939 it was possible to talk in common phrase of the Common-
wealth and Empire, two radically different components of the one vast
structure: a Commonwealth linked together in free association, an Empire
marked by subjection. After 1945 there was no halt to the free constitu-
tional development of the Commonwealth — a point already made — as the
relative importance of Britain the world power declined, and new varieties
of foreign policy, new regional alignments, emerged. It was possible for
Australia and New Zealand in 1951 to enter into a treaty with the United
States— ANZUS — for ‘Pacific defence’, in which Great Britain did not
participate, though all three, with other countries, were in the organisation
called SEATO, set up by the South-East Asia Collective Defence Treaty
of 1954. But no more was there a halt to the constitutional development of
the Empire. The war which began in 1939 was fought on terms which
almost forbade the existence of an empire, if subjection was to be the mark
of empire; the attitude of the British people towards the concept of empire
was undergoing a profound change; it emerged from war in 1945 unable
much longer to bear the material, any more than the psychological, burden
of empire. It was, in fact, not alone among western powers, a metropolitan
power in retreat. The retreat, however, was also an advance; and with
some hope, if not with entire faith, men planned for a new, an inter-racial,
commonwealth. 1
The immediate event, one on the largest scale, was the independence of
India. The second, contemporaneous, was the independence as a dominion
of Ceylon, where since its last political advance to ‘semi-responsible’
1 For the changes in India and South-East Asia see above, ch. xi.
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government in 1931 there had been too much reservation of power, too
little real autonomy, so that a new and considerably improved constitution
in 1946 was followed almost inevitably by an act of parliament (the Ceylon
Independence Act, 1947) and an order in council which had the effect of
extending to Ceylon the provisions of the Statute of Westminster, 1931 —
an extension which was not, certainly, in the minds of the makers of that
statute. In the West Indies there was greater hope than in 1932, from a
conference of seven colonies that met in Jamaica in 1947 and set up a
standing committee to work out the details. A federal constitution was
evolved by 1958, only to break down almost at once in practice, with
Jamaica and Trinidad emerging as separate dominions in 1962. In Nigeria
the main colony, where alone there had been a legislative council, and the
two regions, north and south, were in 1947 all given ‘houses of assembly’,
with unofficial majorities, crowned with a legislative council for the whole
country, also with an unofficial majority.
New concepts were taking hold on the African scene, being introduced
by the ruling power to meet demands which were growing irresistible.
These were Western, not African, concepts, and they killed indirect rule
stone dead. The essential ones were government by elected representatives,
and government through ministers on the British model. This was party
government, and it was in the years immediately after the war that national
parties proclaimed their existence — that is, parties whose primary demand
was national self-government. Party divisions in the European sense could
wait. The national, or rather nationalist, parties did not fail to get mass
support; and the fact that a number of their leaders, young, educated,
political-minded in a new way for Africans, spent periods in prison on
charges of sedition did not lessen that support. In face of such demand
no promise of parliamentary government in the distant future could make
the slightest sense. By the end of the 1940s British officials and politicians
were convinced of this ; the next decade was thick with constitutions and
constitutional conferences; and within a decade and a half the majority
of Africans, for good or ill, were their own political masters. 1
1 The order in which the African countries attained independence within the Common-
wealth was: the Gold Coast, as Ghana, 1957 (republic i960); Nigeria i960; Sierra Leone
1961; Tanganyika 1961 (republic 1962, United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, a
few months later called Tanzania, 1964); Uganda 1962 (republic 1962); Kenya 1963
(republic 1964); Nyasaland, as Malawi, 1964; Northern Rhodesia, as Zambia (republic),
1964.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
T he revolution of 1917 broke out in the middle of the first world war,
in which Russia, although belonging to an eventually victorious
coalition of powers, suffered the heaviest defeats. The revolution
may therefore appear to have been merely the consequence of military
collapse. Yet the war only accelerated a process which had for decades
been sapping the old order and which had more than once been intensified
by military defeat. Tsardom tried to overcome the consequences of its
failure in the Crimean War by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 was immediately followed
by an annus mirabilis of revolution. After the military disasters of 1915-16
the movement started again from the points at which it had come to a
standstill in 1905: the December rising of the workers of Moscow had
been the last word of the revolution in 1905 ; its first word in 1917 was the
armed rising in St Petersburg. The most significant institution created by
the revolution of 1905 had been the ‘council of workers’ deputies’ or the
soviet of St Petersburg. After an interval of twelve years, in the first days
of the new upheaval, the same institution sprang into life again to become
the main focus of the drama that was now to unfold.
When the events of 1917 are compared with the great French revolution
or the English puritan revolution, one is struck by the fact that conflicts
and controversies which, in those earlier revolutions, it took years to
resolve were all compressed and settled within the first week of the
upheaval in Russia. The classical prelude to other revolutions, consisting
in disputes between the monarch and some sort of a parliamentary body,
was lacking in 1917. The defenders of the old absolutism of the Romanovs
had almost no say; they disappeared from the stage, as it were, as soon
as the curtain was raised. The constitutionalists, who had wished to
preserve the monarchy but to subject it to a degree of parliamentary
control, had almost no chance openly to state their programme; in the
first days of the revolution the strength of the republican feeling compelled
them to fold up their monarchical banners and to pursue their objectives
as constitutionalists tout court. No counterpart of the French states
general or the English parliament existed. The main content of the events
of 1917 was the struggle between groups that until recently formed the
extreme wing of a clandestine opposition, the Russian Gironde (the
moderate Socialists) and the Russian Mountain (the Bolsheviks).
The ‘ constitutionalist ’ phase of the revolution had actually been played
out before 1917. In his October Manifesto of 1905, the tsar had promised
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to convene a representative parliament. But whereas Charles I or
Louis XYI, before they were dethroned, had made to their national
parliamentary institutions concession after concession, Tsar Nicholas II
quickly recovered from the ‘panic’ of 1905 and reasserted himself as the
autocrat of All the Russias. The political history of the years 1906-16
was marked by the continuous degradation of Russia’s quasi-parliaments,
the dumas. These were mere consultative bodies, without right to control
the government ; they were suspended or disbanded by the tsar’s arbitrary
edicts ; and their members were not infrequently imprisoned or deported.
In March 1917 there was thus no real parliamentary institution to serve
as a platform for the contending parties or to provide a framework for
their controversies. The soviet was destined to become the spectacular
and powerful centre of the whole movement.
The warning of 1905 was wasted on tsardom. Not only did the
autocratic government continue — it did so in an atmosphere of growing
corruption and decadence, in which the bizarre Rasputin scandal was
possible. The economic and social structure of the country remained un-
changed, in all essentials. About 30,000 landlords were still in possession
of nearly 70 million dessyatin of land. 1 On the other hand, 10-5 million
peasants owned only 75 million dessyatin. One-third of the peasantry was
completely landless. The technical level of agriculture was barbarously
low: according to the census of 1910, 10 million wooden ploughs and
sokhas and 25 million wooden harrows were in use and only 4 2 million
iron ploughs and less than half a million iron harrows. Mechanical
traction was almost unknown. More than one-third of the farmsteads
possessed no implements at all, and 30 per cent had no cattle. No wonder
that in the last years before the war the average yield of grain per acre
was only one-third of that harvested by the German farmer and one-half
of that harvested by the French peasant.
This stupendous burden of poverty was made even heavier by the annual
tributes which the peasantry paid to the landlords — their value was
estimated at 400-500 million gold roubles per year. More than half of
the estates mortgaged at the ‘Gentry’s bank’ were rented to the peasants
for sharecropping or other feudal forms of rent. The landlord’s share was
often 50 per cent of the crop. More than half a century after the emancipa-
tion of the serfs the survivals of serfdom were numerous and strong, and
in some parts, as in the Caucasus, ‘temporary serfdom’ openly existed
until 1912. The demand for lower rents and for the reduction and abolition
of ‘ servitudes ’ grew more and more insistent, until it was superseded by
the clamour for the total expropriation of the landlords and the distribu-
tion of their estates among the peasants.
Such conditions made a gigantic jacquerie inevitable, sooner or later.
The disorganising effects of the war heightened the explosive mood of
1 1 dessyatin equals 2-7 acres.
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the peasantry. The successive mobilisations of 1914-16 deprived farming
of nearly half its fit manpower; cattle were slaughtered en masse for the
needs of the army ; and the output of agricultural implements fell to 25 per
cent of normal, while their import from abroad, on which agriculture had
heavily depended in peace-time, stopped altogether. With the decline in
production the burden of the rents became unbearable, and the peasants’
hunger for land irresistible. In the interval between 1905 and 1917 only one
major agrarian reform had been attempted : the Stolypin reform of Novem-
ber 1906 had intended to facilitate the growth of a layer of wealthy farmers,
upon whose conservatism the regime could rely. But the effects of the be-
lated reform were relatively insignificant, and they were largely undone by
the war.
Agricultural poverty was matched by industrial backwardness. On the
eve of the war, Russian industry produced 30 kilograms of iron per head of
population, compared with 203 in Germany, 228 in Great Britain and 326
in the United States. The output of coal per head of population was 0-2 tons
in Russia, 2-8 in Germany, 6-3 in Great Britain and 5-3 in the United States.
The consumption of cotton was 3-1 kilograms per person, compared with
19 0 in Great Britain and 14-0 in the United States. Russia possessed only
the beginnings of electrical and machine-building industries, no machine-
tool industry, no chemical plants, no motor-car factories. In war the pro-
duction of armaments was forced up, but output in the basic industries
declined. In 1 9 14- 1 7 no more than 3-3 million rifles were manufactured for
the 15 million men who had been called up. Industrial backwardness was
inevitably translated into military weakness, despite the delivery of arms
and munitions by Russia’s western allies. Yet, by a strange paradox,
Russian industry was in one respect the most modern in the world : it was
highly concentrated, and the coefficient of concentration was higher than
even in American industry at that time. More than half the Russian in-
dustrial proletariat worked in big factories employing more than 500 per-
sons. This was to have its political consequences, for this unparalleled
concentration gave the industrial proletariat a very high degree of organisa-
tion and political striking-power, qualities to which it owed, at least in part,
its dominant position in the revolution. But before the leading class of the
revolution was to display its strength, the weakness of the old regime was
further aggravated by its financial bankruptcy. Russia’s total war expendi-
ture amounted to 47,000 million roubles, of which less than one-tenth was
covered by ordinary revenue — foreign and domestic war loans amounted
to 42,000 million roubles. Monetary inflation was rampant: ten times as
much money as in 1914 circulated in the summer of 1917. When the year
of revolution opened, the cost of living had risen to 700 per cent of pre-war.
Strikes and bread riots frequently broke out in Petrograd, 1 Moscow and
other industrial centres throughout 1916.
During the war St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd.
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‘ If posterity curses this revolution, they will curse us for having been
unable to prevent it in time by a revolution from above’ — thus Maklakov,
one of the leaders of the Liberal bourgeoisie, summed up the attitude of
the court, the government and also of the Liberal middle class on the eve
of the upheaval. True enough, the Liberal and semi-Liberal opposition
in the duma had a premonition of the gathering storm. In August 1915,
after military defeats which cost Russia 3-5 million men and entailed the
loss of Galicia and Poland, a progressive bloc was formed in the duma.
It embraced the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), led by P. N. Miliukov
and Prince G. E. Lvov; the Octobrists (led by A. I. Guchkov), that
is conservatives who had given up the demand for a constitutional
government and had reconciled themselves to autocracy; and a group
of extreme right nationalists, whose spokesman was V. V. Shulgin. The
progressive bloc confronted the tsar, rather timidly, with the request
for a government ‘enjoying the confidence of the country’. This formula
did not even imply that the new government should be responsible to
the duma — the bloc did not ask the tsar to limit his autocracy, but
merely to make it more palatable. The main preoccupation of the pro-
gressive bloc was with the conduct of the war. The leaders of the bloc
were alarmed by defeatist influences at the court. It was widely believed
that various coteries counselled the tsar to seek separate peace with
Germany. The clique around Rasputin, made powerful by the tsarina’s
mystical admiration for the illiterate and licentious Siberian monk, was
especially suspect of defeatism. The leaders of the progressive bloc were
united in the determination to pursue the war and were encouraged by
the envoys of the Western powers in the Russian capital. There were
stirrings of opposition in the supreme command. General Brussilov,
the commander-in-chief, viewed with cautious, non-committal sympathy
the moves of the civilian politicians. A plan of a conspiracy against the
tsar was later attributed to another officer, General Krymov. If any such
plans were hatched, none of them materialised. The tsar was strangely
obstinate in his refusal to make concessions. The courtiers did their best
to stiffen his attitude and to prevent him from calling in a Russian Necker
or Turgot and from thus opening the sluices for revolution. On 3/16 Sep-
tember 1915 the tsar decreed a ‘temporary dispersal’ of the duma. He
changed the government, but he did so in a way calculated to insult the
progressive bloc and the opposition at large. Every reshuffling brought
into the administration more and more odious figures and thickened the
fog of defeatist intrigue. In two years of war, Russia had four Prime
Ministers, six Ministers of Home Affairs, three Foreign Ministers and three
Defence Ministers. ‘They came one after another. . . [wrote Miliukov, the
Cadet historian of the revolution] and passed like shadows, giving place
to people who, like themselves, were only. . . proteges of the Court clique.’
Late in 1916 the duma reassembled, and the leaders of the progressive
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bloc openly expressed their alarm. In a philippic, in which for the first
time he openly denounced the tsarina herself, Miliukov repeatedly flung
at the government the question: ‘Is this stupidity or treason?’ Once
again the tsar replied in his customary manner: the speeches of the critics
were confiscated, the duma itself was dispersed. The sluices were tightly
locked against the tide of revolution, with the result that the flood was
mounting ever higher until it would sweep away all barriers at once, and
with them the age-old throne of the Romanovs.
The futility of all attempts to induce the tsar to change his attitude was
for the last time underlined by the assassination of Rasputin, the court’s
‘evil genius’, on the night of 17/30 to 18/31 December 1916. The ‘Holy
Monk’ was assassinated by Prince Yussupov, a relative of the tsar, in
the presence of other courtiers. The event demonstrated to the whole
country the divisions in the ruling class — the assassins in fact aimed at
destroying the pro-German influence at the court. For a while the hopes
for a change in the method of government rose, but they were quickly
disappointed. The tsar and the tsarina, resentful at the assassination of
their ‘Holy Friend’, dung even more obstinately to their customary ways.
Their behaviour was an object lesson — one that was thoroughly assimilated
by the people — that the removal of one clique of courtiers would not
bring about the universally desired change, that the resented state of
affairs was bound up with the tsar himself, or, more broadly, with the
entire monarchical order. Meanwhile the country was sinking into ever-
deeper chaos: defeats in the field, starvation, orgies of profiteering and
endless mobilisations continued; and the temper of the people was grow-
ing more and more restive.
Grey staff nonentities [wrote Trotsky] . . . would stop up all cracks with new mobilisa-
tions, and comfort themselves and the allies with columns of figures when columns
of fighters were wanted. About 15 million men were mobilised, and they brimmed
the depots, barracks, points of transit, crowded, stamped, stepped on each other’s
feet, getting harsh and cursing. If these human masses were an imaginary magnitude
for the front, inside the country they were a very real factor of destruction. About
five-and-a-half million were counted as killed, wounded and captured. The number
of deserters kept growing. Already in July 1915 the ministers chanted: ‘Poor
Russia, even her army, which in past ages filled the world with the thunder of its
victories. . .turns out to consist only of cowards and deserters.’
Yet, when at last the revolution came, almost nobody recognised it or
gauged its elemental power. Like its great French predecessor, it was
at first mistaken for a riot, and not only by the tsar, the court and the
Liberal opposition, but by the revolutionaries. All were overtaken by the
avalanche of events. The tsar continued to issue menacing orders up to
the moment of his abdication. The Octobrist and Cadet leaders pressed
for a change of the tsar’s ministers after the tsar himself had become
unacceptable to the country. Then they urged the tsar to abdicate in
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favour of his son or his brother after the insurgent people had rejected
the dynasty as a whole and the republic had become a fact. On the other
hand, the clandestine groups of socialists — Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Social-
Revolutionaries — thought that they were witnessing one of the successive
bread riots when the riots turned out to be strikes and demonstrations
culminating in a general strike; they were still deeply worried that the
strike would be broken by armed force when the garrison of the capital
joined in the revolt; and they were still wondering about the outcome
of the whole struggle when they suddenly awakened to the fact that
power lay in their hands. And then they began to look round, in deep
embarrassment, to whom to hand it over. The revolutionaries themselves
seemed hypnotised by the power of the old order after that order had
disintegrated and collapsed.
This was, briefly, the sequence of events. On 23 February/8 March
there were widespread strikes in Petrograd. Housewives marched in
street demonstrations — this was the International Women’s Day. A few
bakers’ shops were attacked by crowds, but, on the whole, the day ran
its course peacefully. On the next day the strikes continued. Demonstra-
tors, breaking through police cordons, penetrated into the centre of the
city to protest against hunger and demand bread. Before they were
dispersed, shouts of ‘down with autocracy ! ’ came from their ranks.
On 25 February/10 March all factories and industrial establishments in
the capital were at a standstill. In the suburbs workers disarmed police-
men. Military detachments were called out to break up demonstrations.
A few clashes occurred, but more often than not the soldiers avoided
firing at the workers. The Cossacks, who had been so prominent in sup-
pressing the revolution of 1905, even supported the demonstrators against
the police. On the following day the tsar, from his military headquarters,
issued an edict disbanding the duma. The leaders of the duma were still
afraid of defying the tsar’s authority and decided not to convene the
duma but to call upon deputies to remain in the capital. A committee
of the duma was formed to keep in touch with events. On the same day
the tsar ordered the general commanding the Petrograd garrison to sup-
press the movement immediately. In several places the military fired at
crowds. In the evening the entire garrison was in a state of ferment, with
soldiers holding meetings in barracks to consider whether they should
obey orders to fire at workers’ demonstrations.
27 February/ 1 2 March was the decisive day. New sections of the garrison
joined in the revolution. Soldiers shared their weapons and ammunition
with the workers. The police disappeared from the streets. The movement
assumed such impetus that in the afternoon the government was com-
pletely isolated — its writ ran only within the Winter Palace and the offices
of the Admiralty. The ministers still hoped to crush the revolution with
the help of troops which the tsar had ordered to be moved from the
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front to Petrograd. Late in the afternoon leaders of strike committees,
elected delegates of factories and representatives of the socialist parties
met to form the Council of Workers’ Deputies (the soviet). On the morning
of the following day it became clear that no troops from the front would
rescue the government — the transport of those troops had been stopped
under way by railwaymen. The garrison in the capital was completely
revolutionised. Regiments elected their delegates, who were soon admitted
as members to the soviet, the latter changing its name into Council
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The soviet, commanding the com-
plete obedience of workers and soldiers, was now the only de facto power
in existence. It resolved to form a workers’ militia; it took care of the
provisioning of the capital; and it ordered the resumption of civilian
railway traffic. Crowds stormed the Schlusselburg Fortress, Russia’s
Bastille, and freed political prisoners. The tsarist ministers were placed
under arrest.
Confronted with the accomplished fact of revolution and with the
dominant position of the soviet, the duma committee, hitherto reluctant
to challenge the tsar’s authority, at last made up its mind to form a govern-
ment. On 1/14 March the composition of a provisional government,
presided over by Prince Lvov and including the Octobrists and Cadets,
but not the socialists, was agreed upon. (Only the name of the Trudovik
Kerensky was placed on the list of ministers, as Minister of Justice, but
Kerensky was to assume office as an individual not representing his own
party.) On the day of its formation, the provisional government sent
Guchkov and Shulgin to the tsar in order to persuade him to abdicate in
favour of Tsarevich Alexei. The tsar put up no resistance, but he resolved
to resign in favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail, not in favour
of the tsarevich. On 2/15 March he signed the act of abdication. Mean-
while Miliukov, Foreign Minister in the provisional government, publicly
announced the abdication before he had learned about its details. He told
a meeting of army officers that the tsar would be succeeded by his son
and that until the new tsar came of age Grand Duke Mikhail would act
as regent. The assembled officers protested that they could not return
to their detachments unless the announcement about the regency was
withdrawn. At the soviet Kerensky had already spoken in favour of a
republic and had met with enthusiastic applause. The provisional govern-
ment was divided, and the monarchist and republican ministers put their
case before the Grand Duke Mikhail. Miliukov urged the duke to accept
the succession, while Rodzianko, President of the duma, and Kerensky
counselled abdication. The Grand Duke resigned; but the provisional
government was incapable of pronouncing itself in favour of either
monarchy or republic and decided to leave the issue open until the
convocation of a constituent assembly.
From the first hours of their existence, the provisional government and
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the soviet of Petrograd confronted each other as virtual rivals. The soviet
had no legal title with which to support its authority; it represented the
forces that actually made the revolution, the workers and the soldiers.
The provisional government had behind it the upper and the middle
classes. Its legal titles were dubious. True enough, the tsar put his signa-
ture to the act appointing Prince Lvov to be the Prime Minister, but
historians still argue whether he did so before or after the abdication.
In the confusion of the eventful days the leaders of the new government,
in all probability, forgot the niceties of constitutional form; and the tsar
seems to have sanctioned the formation of Prince Lvov’s government at
a time when, in strict law, his sanction had no validity. Whatever the
truth, the revolution had anyhow discarded the tsar as the legal source of
power. The provisional government represented the last duma, which
we know had been disbanded by the tsar before he abdicated. The duma
had been elected on the basis of an electoral law, the product of Stolypin’s
coup d'etat of 3/16 July 1907, which made it utterly unrepresentative.
This circumstance accounts for the duma’s unpopularity in 1917 and for
its subsequent quiet and complete eclipse. But the chief weakness of the
provisional government was that it was incapable of exercising real
power. The middle classes which it represented were panic-stricken and
politically disorganised — they could not pit their strength against that
of the armed workers united with a rebellious army. The provisional
government could therefore exercise its functions only if the soviets in
Petrograd and in the provinces were ready to take their cue from it.
But its social and political objectives were so strongly at variance with the
prevailing radical mood that it could pursue those objectives only by
devious and equivocal ways. The most influential ministers — Lvov, Miliu-
kov, Guchkov — hoped for the restoration of a constitutional monarchy;
they looked forward to the ebb of the revolution and were prepared to
speed up that ebb, if possible; they were anxious to re-impose industrial
discipline upon the workers and to avert agrarian revolution. Finally,
they were determined to continue the war in the hope that victory would
give Russia that control over the Turkish Straits and the Balkans which
the secret London Treaty (1915) had promised her. None of these objec-
tives could be disclosed without provoking dangerous bursts of popular
indignation.
The soviets, on the other hand, were not only based on the working
class (and, in Petrograd, on the garrison as well). Thanks to the mode of
their election they were in the closest touch with the fluctuating popular
moods and in the best position to rally the masses for any action. The
deputies to any soviet were elected at the factories by the total mass of
workers, and at the barracks by entire regiments. But the deputies were
not elected for a definite term. The electorate at any time could recall
any deputy, if it did not approve of his attitude, and elect a new one in
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his place. This was the original feature of the soviets, a feature which in
later years they were to shed in practice, although not in precept. As
representative bodies, the soviets were more narrowly based than parlia-
ments elected by universal suffrage. They were a class organisation par
excellence, and the mode of their election precluded any representation
of the upper and middle classes. On the other hand, the soviets of 1917
represented their electorates much more directly and sensitively than
could any normal parliamentary institution. The deputies remained under
the constant and vigilant control of the electorate, and they were in fact
frequently revoked. Through an almost ceaseless succession of by-elections
the composition of the soviets changed with the moods in factories,
barracks and on the land. Moreover, as the votes were cast not in terri-
torial constituencies but in productive or military units, the capacity of
the soviets for revolutionary action was enormous. Like gigantic strike
committees, they issued orders to men in factories, railway depots, muni-
cipal services and elsewhere. The deputies were sui generis legislators,
executive agents and commissars: the division between legislative and
executive functions was extinguished. Towards the end of the February/
March revolution the Petrograd soviet became the leading body of the
insurrection. It was to play that part once again after an interval of eight
months.
Yet, after the events of February/March, the soviet did not so much
ride the wave of revolution as it was carried by it. Its leaders were torn
between the sense of their own power and the fear of using that power.
On 2/15 March the Petrograd soviet issued its famous Order No. 1.
This admitted soldiers’ deputies to the soviet, called upon the soldiers
to elect their committees, to take political orders from the soviet, and to
carry out no directives that might contradict those of the soviet. Above
all, the order warned the soldiers to keep watch on arms depots and to
resist any attempt that might be made by the officers to disarm the rank
and file. This was the first apple of discord between the provisional govern-
ment and the soviet after the soviet had acknowledged the government’s
authority. The provisional government charged the soviet with under-
mining military discipline. On its part, the soviet, afraid of a counter-
revolutionary attempt by the officers’ corps, held that it could secure its
own existence only through the allegiance of the army’s rank and file.
It was in its own interest therefore that it warned the revolutionised troops
against attempts at disarming them. Order No. 1 aroused anew the
soldiers against the officers; it also aroused the officers against the soviet.
It raised the issue of the mutual relationship between the provisional
government and the Petrograd soviet or the soviets at large. From the
beginning that relationship bore all the characteristics of a dual power.
The whole period from February/March till October/November can be
viewed as a series of desperate attempts to solve that problem. All the
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time the two bodies were overlapping, stepping on each others’ feet,
trying to patch up their differences and to disentangle their responsibilities.
The dual power was by its nature transitional. In the end either the pro-
visional government or the soviets had to assert themselves and to eliminate
their rival. The Cadet party and the officers’ corps aimed at the elimination
of the soviets ; the Bolsheviks aimed at the elimination of the provisional
government. Only the parties of moderate socialism hoped to consolidate
the dual regime, that is, to transform the transitional constellation into
something permanent.
The trend of events from the abdication of the tsar to the seizure of
power by the Bolsheviks can be divided broadly into four phases:
In the first phase, lasting from 2/15 March to 3/16 May, the conservative
and Liberal leaders of the landlords and the bourgeoisie alone held the
reins of government and tried to mould the de facto republic in their own
image and likeness. At the beginning of this phase, the leaders of the
soviet 1 accepted the authority of the provisional government. Towards
its end the representatives of the Liberal landlords and bourgeoisie were
no longer capable of ruling by themselves. The first provisional govern-
ment had been used up in the process of revolution.
In the next phase, from 3/16 May to 2/15 July, the first coalition of
Liberals and moderate socialists endeavoured to save the bourgeois
democratic regime. In this coalition, still presided over by Prince Lvov,
the Liberals (Cadets) were the senior partners; but they stayed in office
through the support of their junior partners, who at this time commanded
a strong majority in the soviets. The need for a coalition government
revealed that the bourgeois-liberal regime was at the mercy of moderate
socialism, while moderate socialism was at the mercy of the soviets. By
lending their support to the Liberal bourgeoisie, the leaders of moderate
socialism appeared to their followers to be discarding their own principles.
Towards the end of this phase they came to share the unpopularity of their
Cadet partners. They might have saved themselves by breaking up the
partnership and alone assuming power, but they could not bring them-
selves to make this step.
The third phase (3/16 July-30 August/12 September) was opened by
an abortive revolution; it ended with an abortive counter-revolution.
In the middle of this period the moderate socialists tried to salvage the
coalition by assuming, at least in name, its leadership and forming a new
government under Kerensky. But the bulk of the proletariat in Petrograd,
although not yet quite ready to place the Bolsheviks in power, was already
determined to break up the coalition. It menacingly confronted the
moderate leaders with the demand that they alone (or they and the
Bolsheviks) should assume office and openly exercise power in the name
of the soviets. This was the essence of the semi-insurrection of the July
1 ‘Soviet’ (in singular) refers to the Petrograd soviet throughout this chapter.
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days, which was defeated by the moderate socialist leaders with the help
of the army. It was during this crisis that Prince Lvov’s government
ceased to exist. Not only the workers and soldiers, but many of its
middle-class supporters, had turned against it. The bourgeoisie was now
divided : one section, whose influence was declining, still sought to preserve
the alliance with moderate socialism ; another and more powerful section
had come to place its hopes on a counter-revolution capable of eliminating
the soviets. That section of the bourgeoisie supported General Kornilov’s
counter-revolutionary coup. The coup was defeated by Kerensky but only
with the help of the Bolsheviks. The defeat of the two abortive movements
weakened, for a very short time, the uncompromising elements in both
camps; it created a fleeting social equilibrium in which the attempt could
be undertaken to galvanise the Cadet-Socialist coalition.
By the beginning of the fourth phase (30 August/ 12 September-24 Octo-
ber/6 November) both wings of the coalition had withdrawn from the
government: the Liberal bourgeoisie because it sympathised with Kor-
nilov, and the moderate socialists because they blamed Kerensky for
having allowed Kornilov’s plans to be hatched under the protective wings
of his government. Kerensky was now able to form only a rump cabinet,
the Directory, which was so much suspended in a vacuum that it took on
the appearance of Kerensky’s personal government. But, having defeated
Kornilov with the help of the Bolsheviks, Kerensky found that the Bol-
sheviks had in the meantime gained a majority in the soviet of Petrograd.
The revolution deepened. As the Bolsheviks came to sway the soviets,
the moderate socialists tried to assert themselves outside the soviets,
once again finding some common ground with the Liberal bourgeoisie.
Thus the third and the last coalition was formed, which was to survive
for one month only, a month filled with feverish Bolshevik preparations
for the overthrow of the February republic.
The parties that confronted one another had existed and argued over
the objectives of the anticipated revolution long before its outbreak.
They had agreed that the upheaval would be anti-feudal and bourgeois
in its objectives, a repetition in many ways of the great French revolution.
Roughly up to the first world war it had been an axiom for all of them that
Russia was not ‘ripe for socialist revolution’ — only Trotsky had denied
that axiom as early as 1906. But in spite of this agreement on the broad
historical perspective the cleavages between the parties had been deep.
Unlike France in 1789, Russia had entered the era of bourgeois revolution
at a time when she already possessed a very active and politically minded,
though numerically weak, industrial proletariat, which was strongly im-
bued with socialism. In 1905 already that proletariat was the chief
driving force of the revolution, a circumstance which could not but
frighten the Liberal bourgeoisie, no matter how much the socialist theor-
ists dwelt on the ‘bourgeois’ character of the revolution. The Liberal
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bourgeoisie refused to lead the anti-tsarist movement and rallied to the
defence of the throne. Its reconciliation with tsardom was half-hearted:
the Cadets still hoped gradually to convert tsardom into a constitutional
monarchy, while the Octobrists made peace with the dynasty, such as it was.
This attitude of the middle class gave rise to a significant controversy
in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party. Its moderate wing,
the Mensheviks, believed that, since the revolution could only be anti-
feudal or anti-absolutist, the leadership in it would naturally belong to
the bourgeoisie and not to the working class. For all its equivocal atti-
tude, it was said, the bourgeoisie would eventually be driven by events
to assume a directing role in the establishment of a parliamentary demo-
cracy on the Western European model. The Bolsheviks, and especially
Lenin, argued that, as the bourgeoisie had passed or was passing into the
camp of counter-revolution, only the industrial working class could lead
the nation, or at least its majority, the peasants, in the struggle against
the absolutist order. But, the Bolsheviks added, even though the revolu-
tion would be led by a class with socialist aspirations, it could not aim
at establishing socialism in Russia before a socialist revolution had
triumphed in western Europe. The revolutionary government would share
out the landlords’ estates among the peasants, set up a democratic repub-
lic and separate church from state; it would, in addition, introduce the
eight-hour day and progressive social legislation; but it would not
establish public ownership over industry or abolish private property at
large — it would only substitute bourgeois forms of property for feudal
and semi-feudal ones. Only after a period of intensive bourgeois develop-
ment, the duration of which could only be a matter for conjecture, would
the time come for socialist transformation. What was of immediate
importance was that the working class should not shrink from leadership
in the ‘bourgeois’ revolution and not wait, as the Mensheviks counselled,
until the bourgeoisie took the initiative. It was with this perspective still
in their minds that the Bolsheviks in Petrograd participated in the move-
ment of February/March 1917.
Another significant difference between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,
one over which they had first split in 1903, concerned their methods of
organisation. The Bolsheviks possessed a closely knit organisation with a
distinct doctrine of its own, with carefully worked-out tactics and strict
internal discipline, which allowed their central committee to plan its
moves in the sure knowledge that its orders and instructions would
unfailingly be carried out by the rank and file. The party had its recognised
leader in Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin, in whose personality were blended
such diverse qualities as enormous scholarship, the passionate tempera-
ment of the revolutionary, tactical genius and great administrative abili-
ties. Lenin swayed his party by means of his powers of persuasion and
through his moral authority rather than by means of that mechanical
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discipline which later became the characteristic trait of Bolshevism.
Menshevism, on the other hand, was more or less shapeless in organisa-
tion and vague in matters of doctrine. One of its wings bordered on
bourgeois liberalism, another on Bolshevism; in between these wings there
was a wide range of intermediate positions. The Mensheviks had many gifted
politicians, great orators and brilliant writers, but no national leadership
capable of conducting a clear-cut policy. The February/March revolution
found the party split into fragments. Tseretelli and Chkheidze, two
Georgians, were its most authoritative spokesmen in the heyday of
the February republic. Tseretelli had been a hard-labour convict under
tsardom, and his martyrdom gave him considerable influence in the coun-
cils of the soviet and then in the coalition. Chkheidze had been the chief
socialist spokesman in the duma. Tseretelli led the right wing of the
party, Chkheidze spoke for its centre. On the extreme right stood
Plekhanov, the founder of Russian social democracy, to whom Lenin,
in his youth, had looked up as to his teacher and guide. On the left,
Martov, the originator of Menshevism, headed the group of Menshevik
internationalists. The Mezhrayontsy (Inter-borough Organisation) were
former Mensheviks and former Bolsheviks who, for one reason or
another, had stood outside their original organisations. Headed by
Trotsky, this group was to join the Bolsheviks in July 1917. In the no-
man’s-land between Menshevism and Bolshevism there was Maxim
Gorky’s Novaya Zhizn (New Life), where freelance socialists expounded
their views.
The Socialist Revolutionaries formed, like the Mensheviks, a loose feder-
ation of groups and individuals lacking coherent leadership. The party’s
traditions went back to the Narodnik movement, with its pro-muzhik
attitude, its advocacy of a peasant socialism and its terroristic methods of
struggle against tsardom. On the right wing of the party there were men
who, like Kerensky, would have been at home in, say, the French
radical party and who tried in vain to hypnotise the revolution with
fireworks of parliamentary oratory. By Kerensky’s side stood Savinkov,
the ruthless romantic terrorist now converted into a good patriot and into
an advocate of ‘ law and order The centre of the party had its most
gifted spokesman in Chernov, Minister of Agriculture in the second
coalition government, who had only recently, together with Lenin,
taken part in the anti-militarist conference of socialists at Zimmer-
wald (Switzerland). The left wing of the party, most authentically identi-
fied with the old revolutionary strand of the Narodnik movement, was
represented by the veterans Spiridonova and Natanson who were to join
hands with the Bolsheviks in October /November. While the following of
the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was predominantly urban, the Social
Revolutionary leaders, though they belonged to the intelligentsia, were
the mouthpieces of the peasantry. The right wing spoke with the
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conservative voice of the wealthy farmers : the left was inspired by the
peculiar peasant anarchism that had deep roots in Bakunin’s country. But,
on the whole, the Social Revolutionaries were inclined to look for guid-
ance to the Mensheviks, especially in the first months of the revolution.
The belief in the ‘bourgeois’ character of the revolution, general in
February and March, accounted, up to a point, for the puzzling behaviour
of the leaders of the Petrograd soviet and for their readiness to acknow-
ledge the government of Prince Lvov. This act seemed in perfect harmony
with the Menshevik conception, according to which the bourgeoisie should
form the provisional government in a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. It was not
the socialists’ job to participate in such a government; they could only
support it from outside against attempts at counter-revolution, and at the
same time they had to defend from outside, too, the claims of the workers
against the bourgeoisie. To these principles the moderate socialists re-
mained faithful in the first phase of the revolution, before they joined the
Cadets in the coalition government. The attitude of the Bolsheviks was
confused at first. They had been accustomed to think of the bourgeoisie
as a counter-revolutionary force, and now they saw its leaders at the
head of the first de facto republican government. What was to be the
leading role of the proletariat in this revolution? Nurtured in a spirit
of uncompromising opposition to the upper classes, Lenin’s followers
could not reconcile themselves with Prince Lvov, Guchkov, Miliukov, the
leaders of the landlords and the industrialists. But, on the other hand,
the belief that the revolution should stimulate the development of modem
capitalism in Russia rather than attempt to introduce socialism pointed
to the need for some conciliation. In his Swiss exile Lenin himself had
already solved the dilemma : he had become convinced that the ‘ bourgeois ’
revolution was only a prelude to the socialist one, that the Russian work-
ing class should, with the support of the peasantry, overthrow the bour-
geoisie and establish its own dictatorship. This was an important departure
from his own previous prognostications, one that his followers in Russia
had not yet made. Without Lenin’s guidance, they vacillated between
unreserved opposition to the provisional government and conditional
support for it. In the days of the February/March revolution they were
led by a few young radical men, of whom only Molotov was later to attain
international fame. On 12/25 March, two of their more important
leaders, Stalin and Kamenev, returned from Siberian exile and found
the views voiced by Molotov and his friends to be imprudently hostile to
the provisional government. Kamenev in particular counselled the Bol-
sheviks to adopt a more conciliatory attitude. Lenin, in his letters from
Switzerland, was already expounding the ideas that were to underlie the
October/November revolution, but from afar he could not induce the
party to accept them. Thus in Petrograd, during the honeymoon of the
February republic, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries,
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although differing from one another in traditions and outlook, still agreed
on the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ limits of the revolution. Henoe the idyllic
mood of unity in the ranks of ‘ revolutionary democracy a mood in which
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks seriously considered their merger into one
party.
The basic questions concerning the tasks of the revolution were com-
plicated by the attitude of the parties towards the war. The Cadets and
Octobrists hoped that the revolution would not prevent their government
from waging war and preserving the continuity of Russian foreign policy.
Under the secret London Treaty of 1915, we know, Russia had been
promised control over the Dardanelles and territorial acquisitions in the
Balkans. Miliukov, as Foreign Minister of the first provisional govern-
ment, tried to reaffirm these objectives as the war aims of revolutionary
Russia. But, in order to attain them, the army had to fight; in order that
the army should fight, discipline had to be re-established in its ranks and
the authority of the officer’s corps had to be restored. The Liberal Foreign
Minister became a consistent advocate of ‘strong government’. But the
restoration of discipline was possible only if the soviets willingly co-
operated in this endeavour. Yet, even under the leadership of the most
moderate socialists, the soviets could at best make only half-hearted
attempts at exorcising the spirit of the revolution from the armed forces.
For one thing, nearly all socialist groups and parties had been vaguely
committed to anti-militarism. Most of them had denounced the war as
a reactionary and imperialist adventure, as long as it had been conducted
‘for the Tsar and the Fatherland’. The overthrow of tsardom made a big
difference. It was now possible to claim that the character of the war
had been altered and that Russia’s revolutionary democracy, allied to
the parliamentary democracies of France and Britain, was engaged in a
life-and-death struggle against the reactionary monarchies of the Hohen-
zollems and Habsburgs. This was what nearly all socialists (including
some Bolsheviks) claimed in February and March — to this extent they
became patriots or ‘social-patriots’. But, precisely because they had come
to accept the war for the reason just given, they could not openly embrace
the war aims of the old regime. ‘A democratic peace, without annexations
and indemnities’ was the slogan of the day. This and promises of a quick
end to the war were believed in with deep earnestness by millions of
hungry and unarmed soldiers in the trenches. It was enough for Miliukov
to intimate in a note to the Western allies (18 April/i May) that his
government would honour the diplomatic and military obligations of the
tsarist government and pursue its war aims to provoke a storm of protest
all over Russia. It was over this issue that the first coalition broke down,
after Miliukov had resigned from the ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Guchkov from the ministry of War. The suspicion of the soldiers in the
trenches and of the workers in the cities was for the time being allayed by
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the appointment of Kerensky to be the Minister of War. Yet, in the honey-
moon of revolution, the socialist parties were not yet very seriously
divided even in their views on the war ; they still spoke and acted in a spirit
of sentimental pacifism, which did not prevent them from half-supporting
the war effort. The real cleavage was still to come.
From its first to its last day, the revolution was centred on Petrograd,
and to a lesser extent on Moscow and other industrial towns. To the cities
belonged the political initiative. But the revolution was by no means a
purely urban affair. To paraphrase Marx’s saying, the proletarian solo
was powerfully supported, all over the country, by the chorus of an
insurgent peasantry. From month to month and then from week to week
the clamour rose for a root-and-branch reform in the countryside. By
the middle of the year impatient peasants began to attack their landlords,
bum their mansions and share out their land, until the whole movement
acquired the impetus of a genuine peasant war. The disintegration of
the army may be regarded as just one facet of this agrarian revolution.
The army consisted largely of peasants, who expected the new regime to
satisfy their demand for land and who then ascribed the government’s
procrastination to the fact that the landlords were so strongly represented
in it. In truth, the Cadets and the Octobrists wished to avoid radical
changes in the structure of agriculture. The moderate socialists had for a
long time advocated agrarian revolution; but now they hesitated: should
this revolution be carried out in the middle of war? Was not the abolition
of landlordism so fundamental a matter that only a constituent assembly
could deal with it? It might have seemed that in these circumstances the
convocation of the constituent assembly should have been the govern-
ment’s most urgent business. Yet, each successive government kept post-
poning the assembly on the ground that political passions would be let
loose in the elections, to the detriment of the war effort. The truth was that
the ‘political passions’ had been let loose anyhow, and that every post-
ponement of the assembly added fuel to them. The bourgeois ministers
insisted on delay, fearing that an assembly convened at the height of the
revolution would be too radical ; and the socialist ministers sacrificed the
assembly to save the coalition. Through their behaviour in this matter
both Cadets and socialists unwillingly contributed to the eventual ascen-
dancy of the soviets, which, apart from municipal councils, were the only
elected representative bodies in existence. A constituent assembly con-
vened early enough might have overshadowed the soviets and reduced
them, in the eyes of the people, to sectional bodies trying to usurp power.
In the constitutional vacuum of 1917 the opposite happened; something
like a soviet constitutionalism took hold of the minds of the masses;
and vis-a-vis the soviets it was the successive provisional governments,
backed by no popular representation, who appeared more and more in
the role of usurpers. The Bolsheviks were most insistent in calling for an
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immediate constituent assembly. They had not yet clearly thought out
in what relationship the assembly and the soviets would stand towards
one another, and it had hardly entered their mind that they themselves,
the Bolsheviks, would convene the constituent assembly in a few months’
time only to disperse it straightway. But, paradoxically enough, in
advocating the rights of the assembly between February/March and
October /November, this extreme party of the revolution also appeared to
be more devoted to constitutional form than were the other parties. As to
the great underlying issue of land reform, the Bolsheviks held no clear
views at first. In the past Lenin had on many occasions spoken in favour
of the nationalisation of land, which was in line with the collectivist
outlook of his party. The idea that the large estates be shared out among
the peasants, which the Bolsheviks were to do after their seizure of power,
had been part and parcel of the programme of the Social Revolutionaries,
not of the Bolsheviks; and the author of that programme, Chernov, was
the Minister of Agriculture in the second coalition. Only one group of
Bolsheviks, to which Stalin had belonged, had, in the previous decade,
advocated the ‘ distribution ’ of land.
Thus on all major issues — the character of the revolution, the war and
the land — the differences between the rival socialist groups seemed at
first vague or superficial. The sharp line of demarcation that was to
separate Bolsheviks from all other parties was drawn by Lenin only
after his return from Switzerland in April 1917. His journey through
Germany and Sweden had been arranged by Swiss socialists, after the
British government had refused revolutionary emigres permission to return
through Britain. The German government was aware of Lenin’s anti-
war activities, and it hoped that his propaganda would sap Russia’s
military strength; but it did not expect that in a few months it would have
to parley with Lenin as head of the Russian government. Nor did it
expect the boomerang effect of Lenin’s propaganda upon the German
forces, one of the important factors in the disintegration of Germany’s
military power in 1918. Lenin, as is clear from documentary evidence,
himself conducted no negotiations with the German authorities and took
no obligation upon himself except to promise through the Swiss inter-
mediaries that he would use his influence in Russia to secure, by way of
compensation, the exit of some Germans from Russia. His unusual
journey evidenced his anxiety to find himself as soon as possible in the
centre of the revolution and there to assume the leadership of his party.
He arrived with a clear idea of the course that Bolshevism was to steer.
In his famous April Theses, and in a number of speeches, he forecast that
the revolution would soon pass from its ‘bourgeois-democratic’ to its
socialist phase and find its consummation in a proletarian dictator-
ship. This should take the form of government by the soviets, a ‘new
type of state’ best suited for the building of socialism. But, if all
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power was to go to the soviets, the workers ought to confront Prince
Lvov’s government with irreconcilable hostility. That government was
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie veiled only by the complicity of the
moderate socialists. The Bolsheviks ought to do away with the ambiguity
of their own attitude and to explain their position frankly to workers,
soldiers and peasants until they, the Bolsheviks, obtained a majority in
the soviets and were thereby entitled to wrest power from the bourgeoisie.
Ambiguity was likewise inadmissible in matters of war and peace —
the party must lend no support to the war, which, despite the change of
the regime, was still ‘imperialist through and through’. It was the task
of the proletariat ‘to transform imperialist war into civil war’. The land
of the big landlords must be shared out among the peasants, this being
the chief task in the ‘bourgeois’ phase of the revolution. The transition
to the socialist phase would be speeded up by the outbreak of revolution
in western Europe, which Lenin believed to be imminent. Meanwhile
‘workers’ control’, or rather control exercised jointly by workers and
capitalists, over industry would be a step towards socialisation. The new
state would give the people incomparably more freedom than they could
obtain under bourgeois democracy.
Having begun the revolution it is necessary to strengthen and continue it [thus
Lenin addressed a meeting of soldiers shortly after his return]. All power in the
state, from top to bottom, from the remotest village to the last street in the city
of Petrograd, must belong to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’
Deputies. . .There must be no police, no bureaucrats who have no responsibility
to the people, who stand above the people; no standing army, only the people
universally armed, united in the Soviets — it is they who must run the state. Only
this power, only the Soviets, can solve the great question of land. The land must not
belong to the feudal owners. . .Unite, organise yourselves, trusting no one, depend-
ing only on your own intelligence and experience; and Russia will be able to move
with firm, measured, unerring steps towards the liberation both of our country and
of all humanity from the yoke of capitalism as well as from the horrors of war!
This vision of the proletarian dictatorship, a state without police, bureau-
crats and standing army, had an overwhelming appeal. Retrospectively,
it may seem to have been a piece of sheer demagogy designed to wreck
the remainder of any existing governmental authority. But such an
interpretation of Lenin’s attitude is disproved by his study State and
Revolution, in which he developed the same ideas in a theoretical and
scholarly manner, a study which could not have been written with an eye
to the rewards of popularity but which reflected Lenin’s profound convic-
tion. In view of the subsequent evolution of the soviet regime, it is all
the more important to remember how widely Lenin’s vision of the pro-
letarian dictatorship differed in 1917 from its materialisation in later years.
Still another pronouncement of great significance, which Lenin made
soon after his return, concerned the future of the labour movement in
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the world as well as in Russia. He advanced the idea of the third, the
Communist International, made necessary, in his view, by the abandon-
ment of class struggle and of socialist internationalism by the leaders of
the Second International.
This set of ideas was at first received with stupefaction by many or most
of Lenin’s own followers. But, using all his powers of persuasion and
helped by currents of radicalism in his party, Len in soon converted most
Bolsheviks to his views. On 14/27 April the Petrograd conference of the
party passed Lenin’s April Theses and shortly afterwards a national
conference of Bolsheviks also endorsed them. This was in many ways the
most momentous event since the tsar’s abdication : the honeymoon of the
first revolution, with its pretence of ‘ unity in the ranks of revolutionary
democracy’, was over; and the programme of the next revolution was
now accepted by the party that was to accomplish it. In the national
conference of Bolsheviks which passed Lenin’s motions only 133 delegates
took part, representing 76,000 members. In February the membership
had amounted to less than 30,000. But the strength of Bolshevism
consisted in the quality, not the quantity, of its membership. The average
Bolshevik was an influential leader and organiser in his factory or work-
shop, increasingly capable of swaying the vast mass of workers who
adhered to no party and even those who at first followed the Mensheviks.
After the collapse of the first coalition, in May and June, there was
increasing evidence of popular disillusionment with the February regime.
Municipal elections in the capital exposed the weakness of the Cadets,
the party that predominated in the government; half the vote went to the
Mensheviks; and some of the radical working-class suburbs voted solidly
for Lenin’s party. As a minority, the Bolsheviks displayed great tactical
shrewdness and elasticity. Lenin made his party use every opportunity
of putting its views before the masses, but he did not call for immediate
revolution. For the time being, as long as the moderate socialists swayed
the soviets, he ruled out any attempt on the part of the Bolsheviks to
seize power. He urged the soviet majority, Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries, that they themselves, without the Cadets, should form
the government and thus justify the confidence which the working class
placed in them. He advanced this policy at the first All Russian Congress
of Soviets opened in Petrograd on 3/16 June, and it carried much convic-
tion with the workers and soldiers who had followed the moderate
socialists. The latter had just joined the second coalition government
constituted by ten bourgeois and six socialist ministers. The Bolshevik
agitators now raised the slogan ‘down with the ten capitalist ministers’,
a slogan which stirred the suspicion, shared by the Menshevik and Bol-
shevik rank and file, of the bourgeois ministers. The more the Menshevik
leaders clung to the coalition, the wider grew the gulf between themselves
and their own followers. While the congress of the soviets was in session.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
its Menshevik-dominated executive committee called a demonstration
for 18 June/i July, hoping that the working class would on this occasion
come out in favour of the coalition. But to the surprise and dismay of the
moderate leaders, about half-a-million workers and soldiers passed before
them with banners and posters carrying the inscriptions : ‘ down with the
war’, ‘down with the ten capitalist ministers’, and ‘all power to the
soviets’. Lenin had evidently gained for his tactics the support of the
proletariat in the capital.
In the next few weeks the revolution reached a strange turn. The Bol-
sheviks had already behind them the workers and much of the garrison in
the capital, but in the provinces the moderate socialists still wielded the
greater influence. Lenin and Trotsky hoped that this Tag’ between the
capital and the provinces would soon disappear. In the meantime they
were anxious to avoid any decisive test of strength; they wished to post-
pone such a test until they could be reasonably sure that they could win it
and that a Bolshevik government established in the capital would not
be crushed by forces drawn from the provinces. Yet the impatience of their
own followers in Petrograd led to the abortive rising of the July days.
On 3/16 July the first regiment of machine-gunners, joined by sailors
of the Baltic fleet and masses of workers, staged an armed demonstration,
besieged the seat of the Petrograd soviet and menacingly urged the
moderate socialists to transfer power to the soviets, in which they them-
selves had the majority. The Bolshevik Central Committee tried to curb
the movement and to prevent it from becoming a real insurrection. The
government brought front troops to the capital and suppressed the
demonstrations. In the middle of these disturbances the news reached
Petrograd of the collapse of the Russian offensive on the south-western
front — the operation had been in progress since 18 June/i July. The
defeat, which was to lead to the final disintegration of the army, gave rise
to violent recrimination. The Bolsheviks made themselves the champions
of the ill-armed, ill-fed and ill-clad soldiers and charged the government
with inability to put an end to orgies of profiteering by which food and
clothing were withheld from the troops; they accused Kerensky, the
Minister of War, of having undertaken the offensive under pressure from
the Western powers, and they used the position at the front as an argu-
ment for peace. The government in its turn attributed the defeat to the
subversive influence of the Bolshevik agitators in the trenches. As the
demonstrations of the July days were being suppressed, the Bolshevik
leaders were accused of being in the service of the German General Staff.
The accusation, launched in a popular paper and supported with faked
documents, released a storm of indignation in which it was easy for the
government to inflict telling blows on Lenin’s party. Officers’ Leagues
and other right-wing associations attacked Bolshevik headquarters, de-
molished the editorial offices of Pravda, and went out on punitive expedi-
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tions to the Bolshevik suburbs. On 6/19 July the government ordered
the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai and other Bolshevik
leaders. Lenin and Zinoviev went into hiding, from which they were to
come out only on the day of the October/November revolution. Trotsky,
Kamenev and others were arrested. On 12/25 July the government
reintroduced the death penalty for offences against military discipline
committed at the front. On 18/31 July General L. G. Kornilov was
appointed commander-in-chief in place of General Brussilov.
These events resulted in a ‘shift to the right’, the strength of which,
however, was exaggerated at the time. Lenin, assuming that the soviets
had played out their revolutionary role, advised his followers, as they
assembled for their semi-clandestine sixth congress, no longer to advocate
the transfer of power to the soviets. The leaders of the Officers’ Leagues
and other right-wing organisations considered the moment to be propi-
tious for the final suppression of the soviets and all they stood for. In
fact the strength of the soviets was still great, and the threat from the
right provoked the moderate socialists to action. On 24 July/6 August
the executive committee of the soviets confronted Prince Lvov with an
ultimatum, in which it demanded the immediate and formal proclamation
of the republic, the disbandment of the duma, and the prohibition of the
sale of land until the passing of a land reform by the constituent assembly.
Prince Lvov refused to accept these demands, and his government ceased
to exist. The second coalition was formed under Kerensky as Premier
and Minister of War. It inherited from its predecessor its internal divisions
and its indecision. It satisfied neither of the parties who joined it. But now
it was the turn of the right wing to strike.
For 12/25 August, Kerensky convened a ‘ State Conference’ to Moscow,
in which all parties and social and economic organisations were repre-
sented. The state conference was intended to enhance the prestige of the
government; and it was convened at Moscow, where the Bolshevik
influence seemed weaker than in Petrograd. The opening of the assembly,
however, was marked by a general strike in Moscow, a meaningful re-
minder of the growing strength of Bolshevism in Russia’s second capital.
The conference itself revealed the widening gulf between left and right;
that is, between the moderate socialists on the one hand, and the Cadets
and military leagues on the other. The Conference also witnessed the
incipient antagonism between Kerensky and Kornilov, the newly appointed
commander-in-chief. Its debates were repeatedly interrupted by stormy
ovations and counter-ovations staged now by the left and now by the
right, now for Kerensky against Kornilov and then for Kornilov against
Kerensky. The right wing hailed the commander-in-chief as the saviour
of Russia, the man destined to reimpose discipline upon a disintegrating
nation. The left acclaimed the premier as the defender of the revolution
from both the extreme left and the extreme right. Outside the conference
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hall, the Prime Minister and the commander-in-chief reviewed rival
military parades. In this antagonism, which was in part personal, major
political differences were involved. Both Kerensky and Kornilov agreed
on the need for a strong government vested with plenary powers. But
Kornilov regarded the officers’ corps as the chief prop of such a govern-
ment and himself as the candidate for the dictator’s post. Kerensky wished
to free his government from the pressure of the soviets, but willy-nilly he had
to rely on the soviets’ support — he was himself still a member of the soviet
executive committee. He had issued the order reintroducing the death
penalty at the front. Kornilov wished capital punishment to be reintro-
duced all over the country, for offences against ‘law and order’. Kerensky
hoped to curb the aspirations of the soviets by using the army as a counter-
weight to them, while Kornilov’s aim was the total dispersal of the soviets.
On 21 August/3 September Russia suffered another major defeat: Riga
was captured by the Germans. The circumstances of that defeat were
obscure. From the left came the charge that the supreme command
deliberately ceded ‘Red Riga’ to the enemy. As to Kornilov, he used the
fall of Riga as an excuse for his revolt against the government. On
25 August/7 September he ordered strong Cossack detachments to
march on Petrograd and he openly withdrew his allegiance from the
government. Kerensky denounced the commander-in-chief as a rebel and
resolved to suppress the mutiny with the help of the Bolsheviks. He armed
the Red Guards, appealed to the Baltic sailors and encouraged Bolshevik
agitators to go out and meet Kornilov’s troops. The Bolshevik propaganda
among the latter was so effective that Kornilov’s soldiers refused to obey
his orders and to fight against Red Petrograd. On 30 August/ 12 September
Kornilov was deposed from his post and arrested, and Kerensky became
commander-in-chief in his place.
The abortive revolution of the July days had resulted in a temporary
and superficial shift to the right; Kornilov’s abortive counter-revolution
was now followed by a momentous shift to the left. Its first, indirect
manifestation was the collapse of the second coalition. No sooner had
Kornilov moved against the government than the Cadets withdrew from
it, either because they were in sympathy with the mutiny or because they
refused to share responsibility for Kerensky’s action. Simultaneously,
however, the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary ministers, too, resigned.
Their parties were inclined to blame Kerensky himself for a degree of
complicity or negligence in the early stages of Kornilov’s conspiracy.
For nearly a month no regular government could be constituted. On
1/14 September Kerensky formed a Directory, composed of five ministers
among whom he was the only personality of recognised political standing.
His personal rule, or rather his personal incapacity to rule, which his
Bolshevik critics exaggeratedly labelled as Bonapartism, was to bridge
the gulf between the opposed political camps.
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The shift to the left was more directly felt when on 31 August/ 13 Sep-
tember the Bolsheviks for the first time obtained a clear-cut majority in
the Petrograd soviet. Trotsky, released from prison on bail, was elected
President of the soviet, a post he had held in the soviet of 1905. Five
days later the Bolsheviks were in a majority in the soviet of Moscow,
and soon afterwards in most provincial soviets.
From this swing of opinion, Lenin concluded that the time had come
for his party to seize power. From his hiding-place in Finland, early in
September, he urged the Central Committee of his party to prepare for
armed insurrection. This was the natural conclusion of Bolshevik policy
as it had developed since April. The February /March regime, according
to Lenin, had been made possible by the abdication of the soviets in
favour of the provisional government, and this abdication had been
effective because the moderate socialists had swayed the soviets. With
the Bolsheviks in the ascendant, the soviets must regain full power. Since
the government was not likely to bow to the will of the soviets, it must be
overthrown by armed insurrection. The government too, and its Men-
shevik and Socialist Revolutionary supporters, felt that this was the logic
of the situation, but they refused to believe that the Bolsheviks would act
on it. Altogether apart from this, they were helpless in face of the over-
whelming forces arrayed against the ‘bourgeois democratic’ republic.
It was very difficult, if not impossible, for the moderate socialists openly
to defy the authority of the soviets, an authority which they themselves
had upheld on many occasions, merely because the soviets were now under
Bolshevik influence. At this late hour Kerensky still refused to convene
the constituent assembly. Instead, he convened a substitute for it, the
so-called Democratic Conference, which was in session in Petrograd from
14/27 September to 22 September/5 October. Its main outcome was the
formation of the so-called ‘pre-parliament’, an advisory body whose
authority, since it lacked any mandate from the electorate and had no
power to control the government, was very feeble. It was further weakened
when the Bolsheviks, after some hesitation, decided to boycott the pre-
parliament. The main task of the democratic conference had been to
find ways and means for the reconstitution of a normal government in
place of the rump Directory. But, even after the Bolsheviks had seceded,
a majority of the conference voted against the renewal of the Cadet-
socialist coalition. When Kerensky, three days after the end of the
conference which he himself had exalted as the only representative
assembly, defied its resolutions and replaced his Directory by the third
and last coalition government, that government commanded even less
authority than its predecessors. In theory it might have reasserted itself
by appealing once again to the elements that had stood behind Kornilov.
Lenin was firmly resolved not to give the third coalition enough time for
that.
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On 10/23 October the Bolshevik Central Committee met to discuss
Lenin’s scheme of insurrection. Lenin arrived from his hiding-place to
urge that ‘much time has been lost. . .The question is very urgent and
the decisive moment is near... The majority is now with us... The
situation has become entirely ripe for the transfer of power.’ Two members
of the Central Committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin’s close disciples
and friends, were opposed to insurrection. A day after this session of
the Central Committee they thus formulated their warning: ‘Before
history, before the international proletariat, before the Russian revolution
and the Russian working class, we have no right to stake the whole future
on the card of an armed uprising.’ They urged the Central Committee
to wait for the constituent assembly, which the government promised
to convene and which would be swayed by a radical majority; they
conceived the new state as a combination of a soviet republic with a
parliamentary democracy and held that Lenin’s policy would lead to
debacle. Lenin, they alleged, overrated the strength of the Bolsheviks
and underrated that of the provisional government ; he also believed that
the Russian revolution would be saved by a socialist upheaval in Europe,
whereas they denied the proximity of proletarian revolution in the West.
Against these arguments Lenin repeated that it was no use waiting for the
constituent assembly, for the government had so many times postponed
its convocation and it would do so again; meanwhile the Officers’ Leagues
would have enough time to prepare a counter-revolution and establish
their dictatorship. Lenin confidently predicted that, if the insurrection
was speeded up, its opponents could muster only insignificant strength
against it and that ‘all proletarian Europe’ would rise. His attitude
was shared by ten members of the Central Committee: Trotsky, Stalin,
Dzerzhinsky and others. Only Zinoviev and Kamenev cast their votes
against his motion. The dramatic debate went on almost till the day of
the rising; but to the end Zinoviev and Kamenev were outvoted; the
majority of the party accepted Lenin's guidance.
While Lenin was the moving spirit of the insurrection and, from his
hiding-place, prepared his followers for it, Trotsky was its actual leader
and organiser on the spot. Lenin had urged his party to stage the rising
in its own name, without paying attention to constitutional niceties, and
to start it as an openly offensive operation against the government.
Trotsky, however, was careful to place the insurrection in a wider political
context, to conduct it under the auspices of the soviets and not only of
the Bolshevik party, and to give it to the appearance of a defensive action
designed to protect the revolution from a counter-revolutionary coup.
His artful tactics greatly facilitated the Bolshevik victory : many of those
who would have hesitated to support a rising staged, as it were, as the
private affair of one party only, favoured the enterprise when it was
backed by the authority of the Petrograd soviet or of the soviets at large;
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and many who might have shrunk from an openly offensive action sup-
ported that action when it was justified on defensive grounds. In fact
the rising had its defensive elements: the Bolshevik leaders, at any rate,
were convinced that if they themselves delayed action they would be
forestalled by another, and this time successful, counter-revolutionary
coup, a la Kornilov.
But in what way could the ‘transfer of power’ to the soviets be accom-
plished? In June the first All Russian Congress of the soviets had taken
place and had elected a central executive committee which was to con-
vene the next congress in September. That central executive committee
(TsIK) was still dominated by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
even after the soviets on the spot had come under Bolshevik influence.
The leaders of TsIK repeatedly postponed the second congress of the
soviets, at which, it was clear, the Bolshevik party was certain to have a
solid majority. In the end they yielded to pressure from the Petrograd
soviet and convened the congress for the latter part of October, or for
the beginning of November, according to the new calendar. The Bol-
sheviks linked the date of the insurrection to the forthcoming congress.
After a last and final postponement, the congress was to be opened on
25 October/7 November. The insurrection was prepared to take place
one day earlier so that the congress should be able at once to sanction
its expected outcome, the formation of a Bolshevik government. The
insurrection itself was carried out, on behalf of the Petrograd soviet,
by the Revolutionary Military Committee which had been elected by
that soviet. It was one of history’s ironies that the setting-up of this
revolutionary military committee had not been proposed by Bolshevik
members of the soviet. In the first half of October Petrograd was astir
with rumours, for which there appeared to be some basis in governmental
statements, that with the advance of the Germans the city would be
evacuated and the government would move to Moscow. The rumours
were later officially denied but in the meantime, amid the panic and
indignation to which they gave rise, the Mensheviks proposed that the
Petrograd soviet should assume responsibility for the defence of the
capital. To this the Bolsheviks readily agreed. The Revolutionary Military
Committee was to keep in touch with the city’s garrison, to acquaint
itself with its disposition and to assess its strength. Ostensibly these
activities served to prepare the defence against the Germans, but at the
same time they formed the preliminaries to insurrection. Somewhat later
Kerensky ordered a redistribution of military forces which again was
ostensibly designed merely to strengthen the front, but which was meant to
enhance the position of the government in the capital by sending the most
revolutionary regiments to the front. The Revolutionary Military Com-
mittee vetoed this reshuffling of armed forces. Under Trotsky’s guidance
it sent its commissars to all the detachments stationed in and around
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
Petrograd in order to control the movement of troops. This was a chal-
lenge to the government and to the regular command, one which Kerensky
could not leave unanswered. On 23 October/5 November he ordered
the suppression of Bolshevik newspapers and issued writs for the arrest
of the Bolshevik leaders who had been released on bail. The next day he
indicted the Revolutionary Military Committee before the pre-parliament
and ordered an enquiry into its activities.
While Kerensky was addressing the pre-parliament and indulging in
belated threats against the Bolsheviks, the revolution had actually begun.
His threats merely provided the Bolsheviks with a defensive pretext for
the insurrection. The Revolutionary Military Committee had started it
with its famous Order No. 1: ‘The Petrograd Soviet is in imminent
danger. Last night the counter-revolutionary conspirators tried to call
the cadets and the shock-battalions into Petrograd. You are hereby
ordered to prepare your regiment for action. Await further orders. All
procrastination and hesitation will be regarded as treason to the revolu-
tion.’ The plan of the military operations had been laid down with great
precision by Trotsky, Podvoisky, Antonov-Ovseenko and Lashevich,
members of the Revolutionary Military Committee. During the night
from 24 to 25 October (6-7 November), Red Guards and regular regiments
occupied with lightning speed the Tauride Palace, the seat of the pre-
parliament, the post offices and the railway stations, the National Bank,
the telephone exchanges, the power stations and other strategic points.
While the movement which overthrew tsardom in February/March lasted
about a week, the overthrow of Kerensky’s last government took a few
hours. On the morning of 25 October/7 November Kerensky had already
escaped from the capital, hoping to rally front troops for the fight.
At noon his government was besieged in the Winter Palace just as the
tsarist government had been in the final phase of the February/March
revolution. Within one night, almost without bloodshed, the Bolsheviks
had become masters of the capital. The astonished population awakened
in the morning to read posters announcing:
The Provisional Government has been overthrown. Governmental authority has
passed into the hands of the. .. Revolutionary Military Committee which leads the
proletariat and the garrison of Petrograd. The cause for which the people has
struggled: the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of the landlords’
property of the land, workers’ control over production and the formation of a
Soviet Government — this cause is now secure. Long live the revolution of soldiers,
workers and peasants!
In the evening the second congress of the soviets was opened. The
majority of its delegates (390 out of 649) were Bolsheviks. For the first
time since July Lenin appeared in public to address the congress and to
table two momentous motions on peace and on the land. His Decree
on Peace called ‘upon all belligerent nations and their governments to
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start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace. . .without
annexations . . . without the seizure of foreign lands and without in-
demnities’. The Decree on Land stated simply that ‘ landlord property is
abolished forthwith without compensation’. While the congress applauded
news of the arrest of the members of the provisional government, the
first Council of People’s Commissars was formed on 26 October/8 Novem-
ber with Lenin as its head, Trotsky as commissar for foreign affairs,
Stalin as commissar for nationalities, Rykov (home affairs), Miliutin
(agriculture), Shlyapnikov (labour), Lunacharsky (education), and
Antonov-Ovseenko, Krylenko and Dybenko as the joint chiefs of the
commissariat for military and naval affairs. The programme of this
new government was still hazy in many respects. But its leaders were
determined to establish a proletarian dictatorship and to gain for it the
support of the vast mass of the peasantry which formed the bulk of
Russia’s population. They hoped to obtain that support by sharing out
among the peasants 150 million dessyatin of land that belonged to the
large estates. Their next immediate objective was to conclude peace.
At the moment of the revolution they firmly believed that other European
countries would so quickly follow Russia’s example that the peace would
be concluded between revolutionary proletarian governments of the main
belligerent countries. The leaders of the new regime were less clear in
their minds how far they should go in socialising industry — they national-
ised the banks and transport but left most industries under the dua* con-
trol of industrialists and workers. Finally, they set out to build up the
soviets into ‘a new type of state’ superseding bourgeois democracy
and representing workers and peasants on the basis of ‘proletarian
democracy ’.
Frederick Engels once wrote that ‘people who boast that they have
made a revolution always find on the next day that they had no idea what
they were doing, that the revolution made does not in the least resemble
the one they intended to make’. Engels drew this generalisation mainly
from the experience of the great French revolution, but its truth was up
to a point confirmed by the fortunes of the Russian revolution and re-
flected in the deeds, beliefs and illusions of its actors. In April 1917
Prince Lvov boasted in a mood of elation: ‘We can consider ourselves
happy people. Our generation has been lucky to live in the happiest
period of Russian history.’ Only a few weeks later this ‘happiest period’
was in the eyes of the same man the blackest disgrace in Russian history.
Kerensky in his heyday asked a meeting of soldiers: ‘Is the Russian
free state a state of mutinous slaves?. . .1 regret that I did not die two
months ago : I would have died dreaming the great dream that once for
all a new life had begun for Russia, that we could live without the whip
and the bludgeon, respect one another and administer our state not
as did previous despots.’ The disillusionment of men like Lvov and
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Kerensky was growing as the revolution was using them up and throwing
them overboard. They did not in any real sense make the revolution;
they had no clear conception of its development ; and in them the clash
between illusion and reality was absolute.
The case of the Bolsheviks was different. They were the only party which
in 1917 knew what they wanted and were capable of acting. They had a
masterly understanding of all factors of the upheaval and they represented
a profound historic urge of the Russian people. And yet they too were
to find out that the revolution they made was different from the one
they had intended to make. They too had yet to learn, in a long series
of cruel lessons, that the assumptions on which they had acted had not
been free from major and even tragic illusions.
On the eve of the October insurrection, in his controversy with Zino-
viev and Kamenev, Lenin had stated his two main assumptions. He was
confident that the revolution would justify itself nationally, that it would
by supported by an overwhelming majority of the Russian people. He
also believed that the revolution would justify itself internationally, that
it was the prelude to imminent international revolution. His first assump-
tion, that Bolshevism would be able to assert itself on the national,
Russian scale, was soon vindicated to an extent of which he himself
had not dreamt. For two-and-a-half years the Bolsheviks were to wage
a savage civil war against White armies and foreign troops of intervention.
If from this grim trial Bolshevism eventually emerged with flying colours
this must have been due — in the last resort — to the deep popular appeal
it had at the time. Ir one of its aspects the civil war was in fact a tense
competition in which Bolshevism and the forces of the ancien regime tried
to gain the support of the peasantry. This competition was won by Bol-
shevism. The 150 million dessyatin of land which the muzhiks obtained
under the first decree issued by the Soviet government formed a wide and
solid foundation for the new regime. In defending the Bolsheviks against
the White generals and foreign interventions the Russian peasantry
defended itself against the return of the landlords trailing behind the
White armies. It may be argued that Lenin and Trotsky ‘bribed’ the
peasantry; and in a sense this is true. But this does not alter the fact
that the old system of land tenure was for the bulk of the Russian people
an unbearable anachronism; that the peasantry’s hunger for land had to
be satisfied; that none of the old parties was willing or capable of satisfying
it without delay; and that the agrarian revolution of 1917 gave the soviet
system a stable foundation. So great indeed was the initial strength which
the Bolsheviks acquired from it that it enabled them not only to outlast
the civil war but to risk, about a decade later, a dangerous conflict with
vast sections of the peasantry over the collectivisation of land and to
outlast that conflict too. Into its own national soil Bolshevism had struck
firm, indestructible roots.
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The second assumption on which Lenin and Trotsky urged their
followers to launch the revolution — the imminence of proletarian revolu-
tion in the West — was the half-illusory element in the beliefs and hopes of
Bolshevism. It was only half and not altogether illusory, because the
potentiality of revolution did exist in several European countries. But
the potential did not become actual. When in November 1918 revolutions
did break out in Germany and Austro-Hungary, they confined themselves
to the substitution of bourgeois parliamentary republics for the old
monarchies ; they did not find their expected consummation in proletarian
dictatorships. Moreover, these revolutions occurred later than the Bol-
sheviks had expected ; and in the meantime the soviets had been compelled,
by their isolation and war-weariness, to sign the ‘shameful’ Peace of
Brest-Litovsk. In 1918-20 the sympathy of the European working classes
for Soviet Russia was strong enough to hamper and eventually to bring
to a standstill foreign intervention. To this extent Lenin was not wrong
when he placed his hopes on ‘proletarian Europe’. But his hopes had
reached farther — he had looked forward to the revolutionary triumph of
‘proletarian Europe’. He had always been acutely conscious of the
‘backward, Asiatic’ character of the Russian civilisation and he could
not easily see how socialism could be achieved in Russia alone. In
1905-6, and for some years after, he had expected only a ‘bourgeois-
democratic’ revolution in Russia, precisely for this reason. In 1917 he
persuaded his party that the revolution could pass from the ‘ bourgeois-
democratic’ to the socialist phase, but he was also convinced that it
could do so because it would not stop at Russia’s frontiers. Once the
revolution won in the highly industrialised and civilised countries of the
West, so he repeatedly argued, the construction of socialism would
assume an international character and advanced Europe would help
Russia with machines, technical advice, administrative experience and
education. In the meantime Russia had the political initiative of revolu-
tion; and in order to speed up the process the Bolshevik party set up the
Communist International in 1919. However, towards the end of the civil
war, or at any rate by 1921, it became clear that the bourgeois parlia-
mentary regimes of western Europe had withstood the onslaughts of
Communism, for the time being at least. Soviet Russia stood alone — a
prodigy of devastation and poverty. A readjustment of the Bolshevik
perspective was unavoidable, and not one but a series of readjustments
followed. The first was the partial readmission of capitalism under the
New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921. The next was the enunciation by
Stalin in 1924 of the doctrine of socialism in one country, the essence
of which was the affirmation of the self-sufficiency of the Russian revolu-
tion. The vision of a joint advance of many nations towards socialism had
faded for the time being, or become more remote. What replaced it or over-
shadowed it was the vision of Russia's lonely progress towards the remote
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socialist objective through all the harsh trials of a state-controlled indus-
trial revolution and of a forcible collectivisation of agriculture (ch. xv).
In another and equally important respect, too, the outcome of the
revolution was to differ greatly from the expectations of its makers. ‘ We
never anticipated that we would have to resort to so much terror in the
civil war and that our hands would become so bloodstained’: thus in
October 1920 Zinoviev publicly confessed to a congress of German
Independent Socialists at Halle. In the grim ruthlessness of the civil war
the whole character of the revolutionary state was transformed. In 1917
Lenin advocated the Soviet system as a higher type of democracy, as a
new state ‘ without police, bureaucrats and a standing army ’. True enough,
the possessing classes were disfranchised, and the new state was a pro-
letarian dictatorship. But the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie was at
first considered to be a more or less provisional measure, dictated by an
emergency; and, at any rate, the proletarian dictatorship was to give to
the workers and peasants, that is, to the overwhelming majority of the
nation, more political as well as economic freedom than they could obtain
under a bourgeois democracy. By the end of the civil war the workers,
and the peasants too, had been deprived of their political freedoms, and
the foundations had been laid for the single party system. In the light of
later events it has often been assumed that Lenin’s party had from the
outset deliberately worked to achieve this result, but this view is not
borne out by the facts. It was only in the civil war, when the Bolsheviks
were often unable to tell foe from friend, that they actually suppressed
the parties of the opposition and established their own political monopoly,
gradually and gropingly, under the pressure of events. In later years the
sense of Russia’s isolation in a hostile world coupled with the inertia of
government by coercion prompted the final abolition of ‘proletarian
democracy’ and the transformation of the Soviet regime into a terroristic
police state. History’s irony took a bitter revenge upon the men who had
set out to build a state ‘without police, bureaucrats and a standing army’.
Yet, despite some Bolshevik illusions, which time and events dispelled
either gradually or in the most violent manner, it cannot be doubted that
the Bolshevik revolution, like the great French revolution before it,
opened a new epoch not only in Russian history. The day of 25 October/
7 November 1917 stands like a huge and indestructible landmark in the
annals of mankind; and, although by no means all the implications of the
upheaval then initiated have come to light by the middle of the century,
the October Revolution can already be seen to have initiated Russia’s
extraordinary ascendancy as a world power, and also to have found a
gigantic sequel in the Chinese revolution.
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CHAPTER XV
THE SOVIET UNION 1917-1939
O n completion of their seizure of power in Russia’s two capital
| cities, in November 1917, Lenin and his associates found them-
selves faced with two outstanding problems, both dangerously
urgent. One was the need for consolidating and extending to the remainder
of the country the power they now so tenuously held in the great urban
centres. The other was the need for a clarification of the relationship of
the new revolutionary Russia to the world war, then at the apex of its
intensity. Russia was, after all, a belligerent ; hostilities were still in pro-
gress; the situation could brook no delay.
The political grouping on which Lenin based his power — the Bolshevik
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party — could scarcely
have numbered at that time much more than 70,000 members in a country
of some 160 million. This tiny following was concentrated largely in the
great cities and a few outlying industrial communities. Although they had
by this time gained control of the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, the
Bolsheviki could not claim a majority even within the socialist component
of the Russian political spectrum as a whole; and this component em-
braced only about half of the country’s voting population. In the ranks
of organised labour, in particular, their support was small, though in-
creasing. In extensive outlying regions, such as the Caucasus and Siberia,
they had only the merest smattering of followers. Their seizure of power
in the great urban centres had been rendered possible by the far-reaching
demoralisation of the army, the helplessness of the provisional govern-
ment, their own ruthless employment of irregular armed units, the utilisa-
tion of the soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies as a screen for their
action, and, finally, by their demagogic appeal to the peasantry to seize all
large landed property — a move which, for the moment, neutralised what-
ever serious resistance might otherwise have been encountered in that
vitally important quarter. But the victory was as yet a tenuous one. In
many segments of the populace, far-reaching expectations had been aroused
that had now in some way or other to be met or disarmed. Dangerous gaps
remained to be filled in the structure of the Bolshevik authority.
In particular, the Bolshevik leaders faced a danger and embarrassment
in their commitment to the convening of a constitutional convention to
determine the future political system of the country. The demand for the
early election of such a body (generally referred to in English usage as the
‘Constituent Assembly’) had long figured prominently in Lenin’s political
programme, and his followers had not hesitated to make an issue of the
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alleged dilatoriness of the provisional government in arranging the neces-
sary elections. Preparations for such elections, however, were well in hand
when the November overthrow occurred. There could be no question,
now, of halting the process. Yet the elections were bound to produce an
anti-Bolshevik majority.
The hostility that naturally prevailed against the Bolsheviki in the con-
servative, non-socialist sectors of the Russian public was not Lenin’s
greatest concern. These elements had already met with decisive political
defeat in the fall of tsardom and the now irreparable disaffection of both
peasantry and intelligentsia from their cause; and with the destruction of
the old police system and the dissolution of the army they had lost their
only effective weapons of self-defence. Lenin was also not seriously worried
about his Menshevik rivals in the Social-Democratic movement. They had
little popular support, except in one limited region: the Transcaucasus.
The most serious danger lay with the S/R’s — the Socialist Revolutionaries
— and their extensive support among the peasantry. Elections to a Con-
stituent Assembly would be bound to demonstrate the extensive popular
support which the S/R’s enjoyed, and to accentuate demands among these
and other moderate-socialist elements for the establishment of a coalition
government in which they might have a part.
With these dangers Lenin managed to cope, but only by the barest of
margins. The demands for a coalition government were met by splitting
the S/R party and taking its extremist and politically naive Left Wing into
an unstable political coalition. This association lasted only a few weeks
(to the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace in March 19 18), but long
enough to obscure the issue and to provide a semblance of multi-party
support, above all peasant support, during this crucial period.
As for the Constituent Assembly: the elections were held as planned,
at the end of November 1917. The Bolsheviki turned out to have, even
together with their Left S/R allies, something less than 30 per cent of the
voting strength in the new body. The Assembly, convening in mid-January
1918, showed itself recalcitrant from the start to Bolshevik demands, and
was then promptly suppressed and dispersed, by force of arms, on Lenin’s
orders. This action, its ominous implications notwithstanding, passed off
for the moment without serious challenge in the general bewilderment and
confusion of the Revolution; but the bitterness it aroused among the
opponents of the Bolsheviki was understandably deep and lasting.
Even more serious, particularly in the strains it imposed on unity within
the Bolshevik faction itself, was the problem presented by the need for
defining the relationship of the new Russia to the war. Here, again, the
Bolsheviki were forced to pay the price for previous demagoguery. They
had long denounced the war as an imperialistic one, the issues of which
were of interest only to the capitalist exploiters. They had not called for
a separate Russian peace ; they had denied, in fact, that this was what they
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wanted. They had called instead for the conversion of the ‘ imperialist ’
war into a civil one : for radical-socialist uprisings, that is, in all the warring
countries, to be followed by the conclusion of a general socialist peace,
on the basis of ‘ no annexations and no indemnities ’. But they had in effect
promised ‘peace’ to the Russian people. The situation with which they
found themselves confronted, now that they were in power, failed to con-
form to this projected pattern. The working classes in the other warring
countries did not rise up against their exploiters, in response to the Russian
revolution. The western governments, still not overthrown, failed to re-
spond in any way to the appeal for a general peace which the Bolsheviki
issued within hours after their seizure of power. The powerful armies of
Imperial Germany continued to confront the remnants of the Russian
army, along the eastern front. They could not be expected to remain long
quiescent. The Russian army, to the disintegration of which the Bolsheviki
had so prominently contributed, was no longer an effective fighting force.
The few units that retained some degree of discipline and fighting capacity
were generally anti-Bolshevik in their political complexion. They could
be employed in combat only at the risk that their bayonets might any day
be turned against the new regime itself.
In these circumstances, there was only one realistic course to follow:
namely, to sue for a separate peace on the best terms the Germans were
willing to give. This course encountered such bitter opposition among
Lenin’s more hot-headed followers that the unity of the Party was rocked
to the foundations before the process of capitulation could be completed.
But, in the end, Lenin, who saw clearly where the necessities lay, carried
the day. An armistice was concluded in early December. And on 3 March,
after prolonged and angry negotiations, broken off for a time on Bolshevik
initiative, a peace treaty was finally signed at the German headquarters
for the eastern front, in Brest-Litovsk.
This treaty has come down in historical literature as a classical example
of the draconic, punitive peace. Its terms were indeed severe. It represented
a bitterly unhappy ending to Russia’s long and costly participation in the
first world war. But it must be remembered that the Germans were dealing
here not with the legitimate Russian government which had opposed them
earlier in the war, but, as they saw it, with a band of usurpers — political
fanatics who had seized power in a single portion of the former empire
and whose right to speak for the Russian people as a whole was as yet by
no means demonstrated.
The greatest hardship of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, from the Bolshevik
standpoint, lay in the implied relinquishment on the part of the new
regime of its claim to the Baltic States, Poland, and — above all — the
Ukraine. The Germans, determined to have unimpeded access to the
resources of the Ukraine for the benefit of their war effort, refused to treat
with the Bolsheviki at all concerning the disposition of this region in
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particular, and insisted on concluding a separate peace with a small group
of Ukrainian separatists — the so-called Rada — who were trying, in the
aftermath of the breakdown of the old empire, to establish themselves as
the government of an independent Ukraine. In addition to this, the
Germans denied the right of the Soviet government to speak for Finland
or the Baltic States. All this was of course a bitter blow to the Russian
Communists, but it was a blow to their hopes rather than to their posses-
sions. None of the regions in question was one in which they had yet
succeeded in establishing their power (though they did succeed in seizing
the Ukrainian centre of Kiev on the very day the peace between the Ger-
mans and the Rada was signed). Their claim to speak for the people of
these regions rested, at the moment, primarily on their own ambitions,
which the Germans, understandably, viewed with an emphatic lack of
sympathy.
The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was entered into by both sides for wholly
opportunistic reasons that implied no acceptance of the permanency or
legitimacy of the other party. Coming as it did only some eight months
before the collapse of the German war effort, its validity was of brief
duration. Its execution was marked by many co nf licts and disagreements
between the two parties. But it yielded for the Bolsheviki what they at the
moment most wanted: immunity from further military punishment by the
Germans, and a period of respite in which to consolidate their power and
to extend it to those parts of the former empire not overrun by the
Germans.
The conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace brought to an end the un-
stable governmental coalition with the Left S/R’s. Their popular strength
being largely in the Ukraine, they were particularly affected by the German
occupation of that region. They viewed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as a
humiliating capitulation and refused to share responsibility for it. They
were also estranged by the draconic means to which the Bolsheviki had
been resorting for the extraction of grain from the peasants.
Prior to the seizure of power, Lenin had not hesitated to encourage the
peasants to seize whatever land was not already in their possession. With
a view to neutralising peasant resistance to the establishment of Bolshevik
rule, he had even adopted in toto the agrarian programme of the S/R’s,
which abolished private ownership in theory while permitting in actuality
a distribution of larger holdings among the poorer peasants. But the sharp
ideological hostility entertained by the Bolsheviki for the peasantry, as a
class, never really abated; and when, in the winter and spring of 1918,
deliveries of food to the cities fell off disastrously as a result of the extreme
disorganisation of the economy, the regime did not hesitate to resort to
harsh and confiscatory measures to get grain to the industrial workers
and to such armed units as were prepared to accept Communist leadership.
It was these practices, together with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, that
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alienated the Left S/R’s. Now, in the spring of 1918, they not only left the
government, but struck out on an independent line, embarrassing the
Soviet leaders by mounting a series of attentats against leading German
officials (both the German Ambassador in Moscow and the military
commander in Kiev fell victim to these assaults) and even in some instances
attempting to challenge Soviet authority by armed force.
It was not only among the Left S/R’s that violent opposition to the
Communists was by now crystallising. In several outlying parts of the
country, to which Bolshevik power had not yet been extended, political
bodies or entities hostile, or at least resistant, to Bolshevik rule were now
establishing their authority. Some were inspired by other socialists,
primarily S/R’s. Others proceeded from conservative elements, partisans
of the old regime. These latter had even bridled at accepting the authority
of the provisional government. They now had no intention of submitting
peacefully to that of the Bolsheviki. Many of them had been stunned,
initially, by the swiftness and audacity of the Bolshevik seizure of power;
but by the spring of 1918 they had time to take the measure both of the
slenderness of Bolshevik popular support and of the menacing intolerance
with which the Communist leaders were pursuing a total monopoly of
power. They now gathered for the counter-attack.
To these general national reactions, coming from people whose political
aspirations related to the traditional Russian territory as a whole, there
were added numerous separatist tendencies released by the recent collapse
of the multi-national tsarist empire. Such tendencies were stimulated by
the emergence of similar tendencies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as
well as by the commitment of the Allied governments (and the Bolshevik
leaders themselves, for that matter) to the principle of self-determination.
In Finland, there was already in progress, by the spring of 1918, a bitter
civil war between Communists and anti-Communists. One of the issues
was the future relationship of that country to what was now a Communist
Russia — a question soon to be decided in favour of complete independence.
In the Ukraine, a separatism defiant of Bolshevik authority was being
upheld by German bayonets. Similar particularistic tendencies were
smouldering in a number of other regions of the former empire. By late
spring of 1918, in short, the delayed political reaction to the Bolshevik
seizure of power, fortified by centrifugal tendencies throughout the terri-
tory of the former empire, was beginning to make itself strongly felt; and
political opposition to the Bolsheviki awaited only some special stimulus
to bring it into full military activity.
This stimulus came in the summer of 1918, in the form of the Allied
military intervention. Russia’s departure from the war, accompanied as it
was by the transfer of hundreds of thousands of German troops from the
eastern to the western front and the opening up of the Ukraine to German
economic exploitation, had caused intense excitement and alarm in the
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Allied capitals — particularly in London and Paris. To Allied military
planners, the total collapse of all military resistance to Germany in the
east, occurring just as the last great German offensive was developing in
the west, appeared as nothing less than a disaster. Around the time of the
conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the wildest schemes were enter-
tained in London and Paris for restoring some sort of fighting front in
Russia, with a view to diverting at least a portion of German strength
from the west. Initially, some of these schemes envisaged military support
for the Bolsheviki. It was hoped that the Bolshevik leaders, with their
hands thus strengthened, could be induced to scrap the Brest-Litovsk
Treaty and to resume military operations against the Germans. For a time,
in March and April 1918, Trotsky, now People’s Commissar for War,
took care not to discourage such hopes entirely. He feared that the
Germans might disregard the treaty and resume hostilities, and was con-
cerned to hold open the possibility of Allied support in such a contingency.
By May, however, it was clear that the Germans, however severely they
might interpret the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in other respects, did not intend
any serious incursions on to the territory under Soviet control. With this,
the Bolshevik leaders lost interest in military collaboration with the Allies;
and opinion in the Allied capitals swung, accordingly, to the idea of military
intervention in Russia in disregard or defiance of Bolshevik wishes. If
resistance to Germany could not be restored in collaboration with the
Bolsheviki, perhaps— it was reasoned — it could be restored in collaboration
with other Russian political factions.
Most of the opponents of the Bolsheviki, particularly the conservative
ones, still professed loyalty to the Allies and a desire to see Russia resume
participation in the war. It is clear in retrospect that these professions
were made more in the hope of enlisting Allied aid in the struggle against
the Communists than out of any enthusiasm for the Allied cause or any
serious intention of resuming hostilities against the Germans. The Russian
army, after all, had now effectively ceased to exist. Nothing could have
moved the mutinous peasant-soldiers, now largely demobilised, to go
back into the trenches. At no time do the Allies appear fully to have
realised that arms placed at that moment in the hands of any Russian
faction would inevitably be used primarily against other Russians, in
civil struggle, rather than against the Germans. But desperation bred
wishful thinking. Extravagant claims as to the response that could be
expected if only Allied troops were to set foot on Russian soil were given
ready credence in London and Paris. And out of these desperate hopes
came the decisions that led to the dispatch to Russia of the various minor
expeditions known collectively as the Allied intervention.
Strictly speaking, the intervention may be said to have begun not with
the dispatch of new military units to Russia but with the action of one
Allied force that was already there. This was the Czechoslovak Corps,
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composed of Czechs and Slovaks (largely prisoners of war) hostile to the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. This Corps had been stationed alongside the
Russians on the eastern front before the latter collapsed. It was, by late
1917, theoretically under French command and hence in the formal sense
an Allied force. In contrast to most of the Russian units along the front,
it had retained its discipline, even after the November overthrow. But its
position on the front was rendered untenable by Russia’s withdrawal
from the war. Arrangements were made, around the time of Brest-Litovsk,
for its evacuation, via Siberia, to the western front. In May 1918, how-
ever, in the course of this evacuation, a conflict broke out between certain
of the Czech units and the Communist authorities in western Siberia.
In a matter of days the Czechs succeeded, somewhat to their own surprise,
in seizing large sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Anti-Communist
factions in this region naturally saw their chance and at once joined in the
action against the Communists.
The Czechs enjoyed much sympathy in Washington. It was the situation
resulting from their conflict with the Communist authorities in Siberia
that led President Wilson (who understood the situation very poorly) to
yield at long last to the pressures the French and British had been exerting
on him since the beginning of the year and to consent to the dispatch of an
American expeditionary force to eastern Siberia. The Japanese immediately
followed suit by sending a much larger contingent, and for wholly different
purposes. At the same time a mixed Allied force, under British command
but with Americans forming the largest contingent of rank and file, was
dispatched to north Russia (Archangel), where friendly political elements,
at odds with the Bolsheviki, were pleading for their arrival. Finally, British
expeditions, tiny in numbers but full of dash and determination, crossed
the southern border of the former empire at two points, in the Trans-
caucasus and Transcaspia, with a view to preventing the Turks and the
Germans from capitalising too extravagantly on the collapse of the
Russian military effort in that region.
These Allied expeditions were all minor in scale. Their purposes were
incredibly confused. Naturally, they served everywhere to release and to
stimulate military opposition to the Communists. In this way they un-
questionably had much to do with the unleashing of the Russian Civil
War. As a result of this association with anti-Communist Russian elements,
together with the alarm and distaste produced upon them by Communist
policies and views generally, many Allied officials in Russia unquestion-
ably came to entertain a strong dislike for the Bolsheviki, to give
credence to the abundant rumours that they were in league with the
Germans, to regard them as inimical to the Allied cause, and to view it
as one of the purposes of the intervention to bring about their overthrow.
Yet, with the exception of the Japanese incursion into eastern Siberia, and
a French expedition to southern Russia (not sent until after the armistice),
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the considerations leading to the dispatch of these expeditions were
initially ones relating primarily to the prosecution of the war against
Germany. Certainly the expeditions in north Russia, in Siberia, and in the
Caucasus and central Asia, would never have been sent had there not
been a world war in progress and had it not been thought that their
activity in Russia would be useful to an Allied victory. That they were so
slow in being withdrawn after the Armistice was attributable partly to
technical difficulties, partly to inter- Allied misunderstandings and rivalries,
partly to the extent to which they had by that time involved themselves
with anti-Communist forces in the Russian Civil War. Except in north
Russia, none of them became very seriously involved in military operations
against Soviet forces. In no case was their eventual withdrawal the result
of military necessity. They were withdrawn mainly because the termination
of the world war removed the original rationale for their presence in
Russia, and because the attempt to hold them there when hostilities had
ceased elsewhere led to formidable problems of morale, but also because
the grievous disunity prevailing among the various Russian factions with
whom they found themselves associated made further military or political
collaboration fruitless and unpromising.
While the Russian Civil War was thus touched off by the Allied inter-
vention, it would be wrong to say that the intervention greatly affected its
course. In the main theatres of the Civil War— the Urals, the Central
Volga district, the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the Crimea —
the Allied expeditions (with the exception of the Czechs, and then only
briefly) were scarcely a military factor. The Allied governments did give
important help to the anti-Communist factions in the form of military
supplies and financial aid. In many ways, however, the intervention, never
popular with the Russian people, seems to have benefited, rather than
damaged, the Bolshevik cause.
The term ‘Civil War’ is the one generally used to describe the whole
complex of military events by which, in the period from mid-1918 to
March 1921, the Russian Communists succeeded in eliminating those of
their internal opponents who opposed them by force of arms and in
extending the limits of their power to the boundaries that came to prevail
throughout the period between the two wars. 1 While no one has succeeded
in finding a better description for this long process of struggle, the designa-
tion could easily convey a misimpression. What transpired in Russia over
those years in the way of armed violence failed in many respects to conform
to the normal pattern of military conflict in which two clearly defined
sides oppose each other over a single battle-line. Unity of purpose and
command did indeed generally prevail on the Bolshevik side, but this was
far from being the case with their opponents. The Communists were con-
1 An exception was the Far East, where Japanese forces were not withdrawn until a later
date.
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fronted not with a single enemy, but with several of them. So great was
the disunity among these latter that they often preferred fighting each
other to fighting the Bolsheviki. In certain instances, they even allied
themselves temporarily with the Bolsheviki in order to improve their
prospects for destroying one another.
Military operations were for the most part on a small scale. There was
a great premium on mobility, and a high degree of dependence, in the case
of all parties, on what could be extorted from the local population in the
way of food, transport and supplies. Lines and centres of communication
were the normal objectives, the control of adjacent territory being more
or less assumed. In these circumstances, territory changed hands, at least
nominally, with bewildering rapidity. Indiscipline, pillage, licence of every
sort, savagery of reprisal, and a fearful disruption of civilian life were the
order of the day. Military operations directed to a coherent political-
military purpose tended to merge with, and to become confused with,
endless variations of local partisan activity, free-booting and sheer
banditry.
In the early phases of the war, particularly on the Volga, in the Urals,
and along the central Asian border, moderate socialist opponents of the
Bolsheviki, especially the S/R’s, played a certain part ; but they were soon
displaced, as a rule, by conservative army officer elements, contemptuous
of the military qualities of socialist intellectuals and even more bitter and
uncompromising in their opposition to Communist power. It is no exag-
geration to say that, in the mutual antagonism prevailing between these
two main forces opposing the Bolsheviki in the Civil War, the moderate
socialists on the one hand and the conservative ex-officers and monarchists
on the other, elements that hated each other no less than they hated the
Bolsheviki, there lay the root cause of the failure of both. For the socialists
were unable to conduct military operations without availing themselves
of the military and administrative skills of the former ruling classes;
whereas the latter were unable to raise reliable forces of common soldiers
without availing themselves of the political appeal to the peasant masses
which the socialists, particularly the S/R’s, possessed. Neither party, in
other words, was able to conduct a successful struggle against the Bol-
sheviki on its own resources alone. Yet mutual antagonism prevented any
effective collaboration between them. At the heart of these antagonisms
lay divergent attitudes, not so much towards the Bolshevik seizure of
power, which all now deplored, as towards the first Russian revolution —
the February Revolution — itself, which the socialists accepted and
approved, whereas the conservatives did not. Admittedly, the superior
discipline, determination and drive with which the Bolsheviki fought the
Civil War contributed importantly to their success and deserve full recog-
nition; but without this basic and unbridgeable division between its
principal opponents it is permissible to doubt that Russian Communism,
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given its slender basis of active popular support, could have triumphed
in the struggle.
In 1918, military activity in the Civil War was concentrated largely on
the area between the Volga and the Urals, where the Czechoslovak up-
rising had touched off hostilities, and in north Russia, where the Allied
intervention had had a similar effect. An episode incidental to the fighting
in the Urals was the massacre by Red Guards in Ekaterininburg (16 July
1918) of the former Imperial couple, their five children, and a portion of
the retainers of the Imperial household. This action appears to have been
taken by decision of the local Communist authorities, in view of the
approach of White forces to the city and the danger that the Imperial
couple might, if alive, escape Communist control. The decision, however,
was obviously within the framework of standing instructions from the Com-
munist leaders in Moscow and received their tacit ex post facto approval.
The year 1919 saw the triumph of the Communist forces both in north
Russia and in the area between the Volga and eastern Siberia. In the
north, the withdrawal of the Allied contingents in late summer and autumn
of 1919 left the local Whites demoralised, divided, and an easy prey to
Communist vengeance. In the Urals and Siberia, after conservative
elements, grouped around Admiral Kolchak, pushed the moderate
socialists aside and seized control of the anti-Communist movement in
late 1918, the Czechoslovaks, whose sympathies lay with the S/R’s, lost
heart for the struggle. The conservatives then found themselves unable
to muster sufficient popular support to prevail alone. After some initial
successes in early 1919 (which seriously misled the Allied statesmen in
Paris), Kolchak’s forces were routed and pushed rapidly back across
Siberia. He himself was captured and executed in February 1920. In the
further course of that year. Communist power was extended to all of
western and central Siberia : to the point, in fact, where it encountered the
lines of Japanese interest and influence. (The American forces were with-
drawn from Siberia in the spring of 1920.) To avoid conflict with the
Japanese so long as their forces remained in eastern Siberia, the Soviet
leaders established in April 1920 a buffer state known as the Far Eastern
Republic. This curious entity, governed by an unstable alliance of Com-
munist and moderate-socialist figures, and resembling in some ways the
Soviet satellite states of a later day, was liquidated in November 1922,
after the departure of the last Japanese troops from the Siberian mainland,
and its territory was then included in the Soviet state. Japanese forces
remained, after that date, only in the northern half of Sakhalin Island,
from which they were not withdrawn until 1925.
Meanwhile, the centre of military activity in the Civil War had shifted to
the southern regions of European Russia. In the summer of 1919, forces
under the command of General Denikin, pushing up from the northern
Caucasus, overran much of the territory between Moscow and the Black
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Sea. By October they had advanced as far north as Oryol. At that point,
however, the fortunes of war changed abruptly. By the end of the year,
Denikin had been driven back into the northern Caucasus. Here, in early
1920, his force was finally shattered and eliminated as a serious military
factor.
At the time of Denikin’s maximum penetration into European Russia,
the Soviet leaders were faced with a simultaneous threat on their north-
western flank, in the form of an attack launched from Estonia by the
White general Yudenich. The approach of Yudenich’s forces to the very
suburbs of Petrograd, in late October 1919, marked for the Soviet regime
the darkest moment of the entire Civil War; and their repulse and retire-
ment, coinciding in time with the defeat of Denikin in central Russia,
constituted the war’s turning-point. After the triumph of the Communists
in these encounters there remained, as a serious threat to their power,
only the forces of General Wrangel, in the Crimea.
It was at this point that the Russian Civil War found its curious sequel
in the dramatic Soviet-Polish War of 1920. In the absence of Russian
representation at the Versailles Peace Conference, it had been impossible
for the Conference to establish any agreed eastern boundary for the new
Poland whose creation it had sanctioned. A boundary suggested by the
western Allies and generally known as the ‘Curzon line’ (not greatly
dissimilar to the border that exists today) did not satisfy the extravagant
territorial ambitions which the Poles at that time entertained and for
the realisation of which the domestic turmoil then prevailing in Russia
seemed to offer such favourable prospects. Until the turning-point of the
Russian Civil War had been passed and it had become clear that the Whites
were not to be successful, the Poles held their hand. They did not wish to
abet the victory in Russia of people even more hostile (as were most of the
Russian conservatives) to the idea of an independent Poland than were the
Bolsheviki themselves. But with the defeat of Denikin this danger seemed
no longer to exist. In the spring of 1920 the Poles launched an attack
which carried their forces to the Dnieper and culminated, in early May, in
the capture of Kiev. To this challenge the Red Army, relieved now of the
greater part of the internal threat, responded with great vigour and skill.
The counter-attack not only wiped out these initial Polish gains but
brought the Soviet forces by early August to the gates of Warsaw. Here
they were halted and repelled, in a defensive action which owed its success
partly to the excellence of Pilsudsky’s strategic direction and partly to the
jealousies and lack of co-ordination that plagued the Soviet command.
The Polish counter-attack, adroitly aimed at the Soviet lines of communi-
cation, forced upon the Red Army a retreat no less precipitate than had
been their advance. The war ended with an agreement (sealed in the Peace
of Riga, in March 1921) on the boundary line which was to endure down
to 1939: a line more favourable to the Poles, indeed, that that which the
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Allies had originally suggested, but short of the more sanguine Polish
ambitions of the moment.
The termination of the war with Poland permitted the Soviet leaders to
concentrate their entire military effort on the defeat of Wrangel. This task
was soon completed, though not without severe fighting. With the evacua-
tion of the last of Wrangel’s forces from the Crimea in mid-November
1920, the Russian Civil War may be said to have come generally to an end.
A minor epilogue remained to be played out in the suppression by the
Bolsheviki (early 1921) of the independent republic which the Mensheviki
had established in Georgia and which had for a time enjoyed formal Allied
recognition.
Severe as had been the demands which the Civil War had placed on the
energies and resources of the Bolshevik leaders, it had not prevented a
certain simultaneous progress both in the consolidation of the structure of
Communist power internally and in the regularisation of relations with
other countries.
Theoretically, in the orthodox Marxist view, the disappearance of
exploiting classes should do away with the necessity for any state power
at all. In the Russia of 1917, however, the non-proletarian classes, particu-
larly the peasantry, could not be regarded either as totally destroyed or as
likely to be thus destroyed in any near future. This meant that some sort
of a state structure, not identifiable with the Party as such, would have to
exist. The necessity for total and final destruction of the old ‘bourgeois’
state structure had long been a cardinal element in the Marxist concept
of the successful proletarian revolution. There could therefore be no ques-
tion of restoring the apparatus of the tsarist state; something would have
to be put in its place. For this problem, the various ‘ soviets of workers’
and peasants’ deputies’, local and metropolitan, seemed to offer the best
solution. It was in their name, after all, that power had been seized in
November 1917. It was by the ex post facto sanction of the Third All-
Russian Congress of Soviets that Lenin had justified his action in sup-
pressing the constituent assembly, thus barring all other approaches to
the establishment of any new structure of power at all. He and his party
were in this way already committed, by implication, to the thesis that the
soviets should constitute the basis for the new state structure. This concept
was given formal recognition when the Fifth All-Russian Congress of
Soviets, meeting in July 1918, approved the constitution of the first
geographically delimited Soviet state: the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), embracing those regions of the former
empire to which Bolshevik power then extended. In theory, under this
constitution, all state power was derived from the local soviets. In
actuality, this principle was effectively negated, not only in the centralisa-
tion of authority in the periodically elected congresses of soviets which the
Constitution itself provided, but even more in the total permeation and
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domination of all governmental processes by the Communist Party. So
extensive was this domination that the governmental apparatus soon lost
all semblance of independent authority; and its various bodies and offices,
instead of respecting the lines of responsibility implicit in their own hier-
archical structure, became the lifeless executive organs of those Party
bodies whose area of geographical competence was similar to their own.
Thus the Party itself, the official designation of which was changed in
March 1918 from ‘The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (of
Bolsheviki) ’ to ‘ The Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviki) ’, remained
at all times the real and sole repository of absolute power. The physical
suppression of political opponents began on a minor scale in the very
first weeks of the new regime; but an attempt on Lenin’s life (in which he
was severely wounded) in August 1 9 1 8, 1 coinciding as it did with the begin-
nings of Allied intervention, threw the Communist leadership into trans-
ports of anxiety and embitterment and evoked, as a reaction, the violent
regime of terror against political opponents, real or potential, that was
to endure with varying degrees of intensity for decades to come, and to be
converted by Stalin, in the 1930s, into the instrument of his personal
tyranny even within the Party itself. So jealous and ruthless was the use
made of this instrument that within three of four years even the most
pliant remnants of other radical-socialist parties or groupings, including
the Left S/R’s, the Anarchists, and the Mensheviki, had been totally
suppressed and driven from participation even in the work of the local
soviets. From 1921 on, if not earlier, the last pretence of the sharing of
power with other socialist elements had been abandoned, and the Party’s
monopolisation of power was unlimited.
Meanwhile, during the final phases of the Civil War, progress had begun
in the regularisation of relations with other countries. The first foreign
governments to move in this direction were those of the border stales of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which, together with Finland, established
normal diplomatic relations with the R.S.F.S.R. in 1920. All wereof course
anxious to fortify in every way possible their newly won independence;
and diplomatic relations with the new regime in Russia were important
from this standpoint in so far as they implied Soviet acceptance of the
independent status. In March 1921, the British, for whom the way had
now been smoothed by the ending of the intervention, concluded a trade
agreement with Moscow, thus establishing a de facto relationship destined
to blossom only some years later, and then after many vicissitudes, into
permanent, de jure representation. The Germans soon followed the British
example, as did Austria, Italy and the Scandinavian countries.
But at that time the world-revolutionary aims which the Soviet leaders
freely confessed, and which they endeavoured by all means at their dis-
posal to realise, still stood in the way of any more far-reaching normalisa-
1 The attentat was perpetrated by Dora (Fanny) Kaplan, a Socialist-Revolutionary.
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tion of relations with the outside world. The (Third) Communist Inter-
national, established in Moscow in 1919 and dedicated to the spreading
of Communist revolution to other countries, was no less plainly an
instrument of the Russian Communist Party than was the Soviet govern-
ment itself. Throughout the initial years of Soviet power, other govern-
ments would either hesitate to entertain any sort of relations with a
regime whose leaders so cynically sought and promoted their overthrow,
or would do so only with feelings of much discomfort and distaste.
The end of foreign intervention and the Communist victory in the Civil
War not only opened up the possibility of diplomatic relations with
foreign states but obliged the Soviet government to come seriously to
terms, for the first time, with the problem of the attitude to be taken
toward national and linguistic minorities within the Soviet sphere of
power. Only a minority of the population of the former empire had been
Great Russians. Even the Great Russians and the Ukrainians together
had accounted for only some 62 per cent of the population. The R.S.F.S.R.,
as it emerged from the Civil War, included not all of the non-Russian
elements of the former empire, but it included a considerable number of
them. And, in determining their relation to the central Soviet power, the
Bolshevik leaders faced a difficult dilemma. The minorities had contri-
buted the greater part of the membership of the Social Democratic move-
ment prior to the revolution. Their grievances had entered prominently
into socialist criticisms of the tsarist regime. Their feelings could not now
easily be ignored. A certain show of federalism was needed, furthermore,
to encourage the spread of Communism to adjacent regions still not under
Soviet control. On the other hand, a high degree of centralisation was
called for not only by the temperamental inclinations of Lenin and his
leading associates but also by the very requirements of the task of ‘ building
socialism’ to which they were now dedicated.
In the formal sense, the manner in which this problem was handled
went through many variations, both in point of time and in point of
differences between individual nationalities and minority groups. Suffice
it to say that in general the problem was solved by conceding to the non-
Russian elements various degrees of autonomy, or at least of the trappings
of autonomy, on the state level, while retaining a total centralisation of
power through the instrumentality of the Communist Party. The minority
peoples, in other words, were obliged to content themselves with the
external form rather than the content of a separate identity — a solution
which left them free, as a rule, to employ their own language for govern-
mental and educational purposes but placed very definite restrictions on
what they might say when they used it. In the initial years of Soviet power,
the regime went to considerable effort to reinforce this faqade of autonomy
by extensive use of native personnel in both party and governmental
bodies. In the later stages of the Stalin regime, however, even this practice
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was weakened, and relatively little effort was made to conceal a degree of
Russian control scarcely different, in most instances, from that which had
marked the final decades of tsardom.
In the winter and spring of 1921, as the Civil War and foreign inter-
vention came to an end, the Soviet leaders found themselves faced with
bitter and urgent problems of internal policy. Large sections of the country
were in a state of economic ruin of which it can be said only that its physical
evidences would probably defy the imagination of most people in the
West. Industrial production was a small fraction of what it had been
before the revolution. Living standards had declined drastically, even for
the industrial workers who were supposed, now, to constitute the most
privileged part of the population. The policy of extracting grain from the
peasantry by forced and confiscatory collections was yielding diminishing
and inadequate returns. It was clear that the multitude of peasant soldiers,
now returning to their villages after demobilisation from the Red Army,
would not be prepared to submit docilely to further such exactions. Most
of them had supported the Communist side in the Civil War with no great
enthusiasm — often only out of fear that a victory for the opponents of
Bolshevism would lead to a restoration of the old regime and a re-estab-
lishment of the property rights of former landlords. Plainly, concessions
would now have to be made to their economic interests if domestic peace
was to be assured and if agricultural production, particularly marketable
production, was to be revived.
On the industrial side, too, a new approach was essential. Larger in-
dustrial enterprises had been for the most part nominally nationalised in
the preceding period of ‘war communism’. To one extent or another these
enterprises had been utilised, by makeshift methods, for the satisfaction
of military needs. But this had been done at the cost of rapid depreciation
of equipment, depletion of stocks, and deterioration of labour discipline.
No adequate system of organisation and management had yet been estab-
lished to replace that of the former private owners. So great was dis-
satisfaction among industrial workers that many of them were returning
to the villages. The cities themselves were becoming seriously depopulated.
The Russian proletariat, in the name of whose interests the Communists
were exercising power, at its best a small minority of the population, was
now threatened with something approaching extinction as a class.
Not only did these conditions threaten the essential economic and
ideological basis of the regime, but the discontents they engendered were
beginning to find support in, and to strengthen, opposition to the Bol-
sheviki within the socialist camp. In Petrograd, such tendencies came to
the surface at the end of February 1921 in the form of widespread labour
unrest, not dissimilar in many respects to that which had set off the
downfall of tsarism in the same city just four years earlier. Here once
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more, as in 1917, disaffection in the local garrisons magnified the dangers
of civil disobedience. And again it was the sailors of the great naval base
at Kronstadt, the same who in November 1917 had played so conspicu-
ous a part in the Communist seizure of power, who were most deeply
disaffected. Their dissatisfaction burst forth, at the beginning of March
1921, in a fully fledged mutiny, which the government was able to suppress
only by military action on a serious scale.
There is no evidence to support the thesis, to which official Soviet
historiography still adheres, that the Kronstadt mutiny was the result of
counter-revolutionary, White Guard, or foreign capitalist inspiration. Its
origins were wholly local — indigenous to the workers’ and sailors’ milieu
in which it occurred. The demands put forward by the mutineers could
stand, in fact, as a fairly accurate reflection of the aims for which both
worker and peasant soldiers had conceived themselves to be fighting in the
recent Civil War. These aims did indeed include the allowance of greater
freedom of speech and political activity within the socialist segment of the
population; but they took no account of the interests of the remainder
(the so-called ‘bourgeois’ segment) of the population, and contained no
advocacy of civil rights that would extend in that direction. They were not
the sort of demands that would have reflected bourgeois, or foreign-
capitalist, inspiration.
The response of the regime, not to the Kronstadt Uprising alone but to
the general situation out of which it arose, took the form of the so-called
New Economic Policy — generally known in its abbreviated form as the
NEP (see above, ch. m). This change of policy did not find its expression
in any single and comprehensive programme, promulgated at any one
time. It was made up of a number of measures of relaxation, the first of
which were taken in the spring of 1921 — some even before the mutiny
at Kronstadt. The most important of them was the abandonment — called
for by Lenin at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party in March of
that year — of the policy of forced, confiscatory grain collections, and the
substitution of a single tax in kind on agricultural production, after pay-
ment of which the peasant should be at liberty to trade on the open market
with whatever further surplus he might have. In the course of the immedi-
ately ensuing months and years this measure was supplemented by others,
the aggregate effect of which was to restore a limited market economy in
food and other consumer goods, to permit an extensive revival of the
handicraft and cottage industries, and to make possible the private opera-
tion, for profit, either by collective bodies (co-operatives, etc.) or by indi-
viduals, of small industrial and commercial enterprises. Heavy industry,
transportation, finance, and numerous other aspects of economic life,
enough, in fact, to constitute what the Bolsheviki themselves called the
‘commanding heights’ of the economy, remained fully under govern-
mental ownership and control.
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This new course was regarded by the Soviet leaders as a forced and
temporary retreat from their central ideological goal of a wholly socialised
economy — a retreat made necessary partly by the failure of the Commu-
nist revolution to spread to the remainder of Europe in the post-hostilities
period (as they had initially hoped and supposed it would) but mostly by
the fact that in the conditions of economic ruin then prevailing it was
impossible to bring about a restoration of economic life without having
recourse, if only partially and temporarily, to the stimulus of private
incentive. A country in which the peasantry constituted some 80 per cent
of the population was, even by Marxist definition, scarcely ripe for im-
mediate socialisation. The NEP was conceived as a temporary expedient,
reluctantly embraced, and due to be abandoned at the earliest convenient
opportunity. But it was clear, to Lenin at least, and to the dominant
group in the party, that this opportunity would not come at any early
date — that the interlude would be at best a long one.
Just as the regime moved in this way to enlist the power of private
incentive in the interests of economic recovery, it also moved to prevent
any political capitalisation on this new leniency by moderate socialist or
other opposition groups. As Stalin himself later said: ‘in the dangerous
conditions of the NEP’ the party could tolerate no intra-party groupings.
Repression of the Mensheviki and the S/R’s (and also of the Anarchists,
who had played a considerable role in the Kronstadt Uprising) was in-
tensified after 1921. In the summer of 1922 such of the S/R leaders as
could be found and apprehended were subjected to long public trial and
a number of them condemned to death. 1 Meanwhile, at the Tenth Congress
of the Party, there was established a series of rather vague new strictures
on opposition activity within the Party, strictures which were to be exten-
sively exploited in later years by Stalin for purposes which could scarcely
have been envisaged at the time they were established.
The NEP was slow to yield its favourable economic results. On the
agricultural side, its effects were delayed by the misharvest of 1921. This
resulted from severe drought in certain of the main grain-growing regions,
aggravated by the accumulated dislocations of revolution and civil war.
It not only produced a major local famine, which took human lives by the
millions, but it also caused a shortfall in marketable grain of several
million tons. With vigorous help from Herbert Hoover’s American Relief
Administration and other foreign sources, as well as by energetic effort on
the part of the Soviet authorities themselves, the effects of this disaster
were contained and eventually overcome. In 1922 and 1923 crops were
again reasonably satisfactory — amounting to some 75 per cent of pre-war
production over the same area. But the temporary setback was severe.
1 The death sentences were subsequently commuted in accordance with a personal promise
given by Bukharin to socialist leaders abroad; but in certain instances the persons in question
were never heard of again.
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In industry, revival was slower and not uniform. Small local industries
(food and leather, particularly) and handicraft production of many kinds
were the first to revive. The revival of heavy industry, which remained
under state control and required greater capital investment as well as
higher managerial skills for its recovery, took considerably longer.
In the long run, however, the NEP served its purpose successfully. By
the end of 1922, recovery was making rapid progress. It continued to do
so into the mid-i920s. The greatest difficulties encountered lay less in the
rate of recovery (except to some extent in the case of heavy industry) than
in certain of its social and economic effects. The initial relaxations led in
1923 to a sharp crisis — the so-called ‘ Scissors Crisis’ — in the development
of the terms of exchange between city and country. A dangerous dis-
balance developed at that time between prices for industrial and agri-
cultural products, industrial prices standing at 170-180 per cent of
1913, agricultural prices at levels closer to 50 per cent. The result was
a natural inclination on the part of the peasants to withhold their pro-
duce from the markets and to fall back on various forms of subsistence
farming or local exchange. The immediate crisis was overcome by the
establishment of a system of price controls, under which prices on in-
dustrial goods were eventually brought down to more reasonable levels.
But the episode served to make clear to the regime that, if one were to rely
on private incentive as a means of bringing agricultural produce on to the
market, there would have to be conceded to the peasant a heavy claim on
the output of the reviving industry — a claim of such dimensions that it
could not fail to complicate the accumulation of capital for further in-
dustrial development.
An even more significant effect of the NEP was increasing differentiation
in the village as between weaker and stronger peasants. All counter-efforts
of the regime notwithstanding, the more affluent peasant proved better
able than his poorer neighbour to take advantage of the concessions the
NEP involved. To Russian Marxists, trained to view all conflicts of
economic interest between large groups of people as political encounters
between cohesive social classes, functioning as conscious, organised actors
on the political scene and locked in relentless mutual struggle for mono-
polistic political power, this strengthening of the economic position of the
kulak was bound to appear as a species of political victory on his part and,
by the same token, as a serious failure and humiliation of the regime.
Opinions differ as to how far the prosperity of the wealthier peasants
really extended at the high point of the NEP. Some historians have
accepted Communist claims that it exceeded anything known in tsarist
times. For various reasons, this seems improbable. But one need not go
this far in order to recognise that the recovery of Russian agriculture in
the years of the mid-’twenties was rapid and impressive; that this recovery
proceeded on the basis of private interest, operating within a market
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economy; that it led to a considerable strengthening of private farming,
bringing much of it almost, if not entirely, to that modest level of prosperity
it had enjoyed in the best of tsarist times, but that it also produced greater
differentiations of income and greater inequalities in ownership and labour
relationships than had existed in the immediately preceding period.
At this same time, a certain amount of private profit was of course
being derived from the operation of the small industrial and trading
enterprises which the NEP permitted. The extent of this too should not
be overrated; but its effects soon became painfully conspicuous in the
revival of luxury establishments of one sort or another — night clubs,
gambling places, etc. — catering to the beneficiaries of this free enterprise.
All of this — the relative affluence of the kulak and the conspicuous
consumption now flaunted by the so-called ‘ NEP men ’ — naturally aroused
keenest disgust and impatience among members of the Party. Its effect
was to lend fuel to the fires of a radical party opposition: of people who
longed for the heroic days of revolution and civil war, who had never been
able to adjust to the more mundane problems of the post-Civil-War period,
and who were eager to find issues over which they could express their
feelings of frustration and discontent. While these differences over the
NEP did not represent a serious challenge to the stability of the Party, they
were sufficiently serious to pre-empt a considerable portion of inner-party
debate and activity during the period in which this policy was pursued.
And their significance was increased, in the spring of 1922, by the fatal
illness of Lenin and the crisis of leadership within the Party which that
illness produced.
It was in May 1922 that Lenin suffered the first of his four strokes. He
recovered sufficiently over the summer to enable him to resume work for
a time in the autumn. In December, however, his condition deteriorated
once more. On the 13th of that month a second stroke quite immobilised
him. Over the winter he remained bedridden, but clear in his mind.
Permitted by the doctors to dictate for brief periods each day, he took this
means of putting on paper his thoughts on a number of questions that
particularly troubled him. In March 1923 a third stroke inflicted an exten-
sive paralysis, depriving him of the power of speech and leaving him a
total invalid. It was in this condition, unavoidably removed from every
connection with public affairs, that he remained, for some ten months,
until his death on 21 January 1924. Only in May of 1924, after the passage
of a further four months, was his political testament made known to
selected Party leaders and responsibly considered by them. Thus gradu-
ally, over a period of a full two years, did the crisis of succession occasioned
by his illness and death impinge itself upon the Party.
For Stalin, the great master of the gradual transition, this protracted
quality of the crisis was unquestionably an advantage. So was the curious
duplication of authority, as between Party and government, which marked
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at all times the Soviet structure of power. Lenin’s ascendancy had been
rooted less in his governmental position as Chairman of the Soviet of
People’s Commissars of the R.S.F.S.R. (this passed painlessly, after his
death, to the relatively minor figure of Rykov) than in his personal
authority among the senior leaders. Stalin, having assumed, in April 1922,
the position of General Secretary of the Party, was already in firm organisa-
tional control of its central apparatus at the time when Lenin’s illness
began. At no time after that was there ever any question of his ability to
exert a decisive influence over the voting in most of the senior Party bodies :
the Central Committee, the Secretariat, the Organisational Bureau and
the Central Control Commission — at least on day-to-day organisational
questions. (The Politbureau, with its special competence for decisions of
high policy, represented a partial exception.) But Stalin was at that time
still a relatively obscure political figure, largely eclipsed in the public eye
by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. He lacked precisely that unspoken
authority on which Lenin’s power had rested. The dominant organisa-
tional position he had so gradually and quietly established for himself
was already resented and opposed by a portion of the more radical Party
leadership, including many people who had played a prominent part in the
initial seizure of power and the Civil War. It was clear that any attempt on
his part, around the time of Lenin’s illness and death, to thrust himself
forward openly as the successor to Lenin would be widely resented and
self-defeating. Before anything of this sort could be contemplated, the
more prominent figures had to become in some way discredited and dis-
qualified in public view.
The problem Stalin faced in attempting to establish his ascendancy was
greatly complicated by the fact that Lenin, throughout the period of his
illness, plainly leaned towards Trotsky as the person best suited to succeed
him in the direction of state policy if not in the day-to-day administration
of the Party. Stalin, well aware of this inclination, took shameless ad-
vantage of Lenin’s physical helplessness to reduce the latter’s current
influence on political affairs. He treated Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, on at
least one known occasion, and probably on others as well, with a rudeness
and inconsiderateness he would surely never have permitted himself had
Lenin been in good health; and he invoked party discipline to prevent
her from appealing to Lenin for support. At the same time, he persisted
in the pursuit of practices and policies, notably in questions pertaining to
his native Georgia, which he knew to be contrary to Lenin’s strongest
feelings. All of this clearly brought to the ailing Lenin a measure of
excitement and distress of mind that could scarcely have failed to aggra-
vate the illness. Lenin’s second and third strokes both occurred at moments
of high emotional disturbance, occasioned precisely by developments in
which Stalin was prominently involved.
Tn later years, there would be suggestions and allegations (Trotsky, just
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before his own death, lent himself to them, though he never made the
charge directly) that Lenin had been poisoned on Stalin’s instigation. The
preponderance of available evidence, however, does not support this
thesis ; nor does it seem likely that Stalin would have been moved, in the
circumstances, to take any such step.
In December-J anuary 1922-3 Lenin dictated from his sickbed the
document which has become known as his political testament. Here he
levied serious criticisms against Stalin, mentioning particularly his rude-
ness and disloyalty in personal relations, and called in effect for his re-
moval from the position of Secretary-General of the Party. He pointed
to Trotsky as the most able of his associates and, by inference, as the
man best qualified to succeed him in the direction of affairs of state.
(It seems doubtful that Lenin envisaged any one person as succeeding
entirely to his unique position within the Party.) In accordance with
Lenin’s wishes, the testament was kept secret by his widow until after his
death. At the time of the XIII Party Congress, in May 1924, it was
revealed to a select group of party leaders. On this occasion, Trotsky,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, acting with a blindness they would some day rue,
connived at the suppression of the document (it was not even shown to the
delegates to the Congress, though it had been Lenin’s clear intention that
it should be) and supported Stalin in the retention of all his Party offices.
It is evident that the disposition reflected by Lenin’s testament became
known to — or sensed among— the Party leadership long before its precise
contents were revealed. The effect was to produce a defensive association
of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, designed to keep Trotsky in check and
to prevent him from succeeding to Lenin’s authority. Signs of the existence
of this grouping, which came to be known as the ‘Triumvirate’, were
visible as early as January 1923. The high period of its effectiveness as a
political alliance coincided with the period in which Trotsky appeared as a
leading candidate for the succession. It did not come fully to an end until
late 1925. By this time, Trotsky had not only abandoned his key position
as People’s Commissar for War and suffered a decisive loss of authority
in the Party but had effectively eliminated himself as a candidate for the
succession by publicly denying the authenticity of Lenin’s testament when
reports of it appeared in the foreign press.
In the measure that Trotsky became eliminated as a rival for the suc-
cession, Stalin addressed himself to the destruction of the political positions
of Kamenev and Zinoviev. This involved initially the shattering of the
local organisational strength these leaders had gained as bosses, respec-
tively, of the Moscow and Leningrad organisations of the Party. The
operation began in the summer of 1924 with the systematic undermining
of Kamenev’s position in Moscow. It was completed by January 1926,
when Zinoviev’s removal from the Leningrad post was followed by a
ruthless purge and reorganisation of the Party apparatus in that city.
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conducted by Molotov under Stalin’s direction. In this way the first and
decisive phase of the succession crisis was brought to an end, two years
after Lenin’s death, with the emergence of Stalin in a position of clear
organisational ascendancy within the Party.
The foreign relations of the Soviet regime had continued, meanwhile,
to develop on the two conflicting planes that were to constitute their main
theatres of activity for many years to come : the plane of the Comintern
(i.e. relations with foreign Communist parties) where the effort was pur-
sued, at least pro forma , to promote the overthrow of the governments of
other great powers ; and the plane of overt diplomatic relations, where the
effort was made to co-exist advantageously with these governments so
long as they continued to defy the efforts at their overthrow.
In Germany, regarded in those years as both the most important and the
most promising target of revolutionary activity, grievous reverses were
suffered in the failure of two major efforts mounted by the German
Communists to seize power: one in the spring of 1921, the other in the
autumn of 1923. Both of these failures had important effects on Soviet
policy. They dampened hopes for any early extension of the Communist
revolution to the remainder of Europe. They caused new importance to be
attached to the shaping of Soviet relations with the capitalist world on the
normal diplomatic and economic levels.
The need for trade with the Western governments and for the tapping
of Western sources of financial credit made it desirable, from the Soviet
standpoint, that normal diplomatic relations be established as soon as
possible with all the leading capitalist powers. The governments of these
powers hesitated, however, to take this step so long as the Soviet govern-
ment continued to deny responsibility for the debts of former Russian
governments and to refuse to make compensation to former owners for
losses suffered by the nationalisation of foreign industrial and other pro-
perty in Russia at the time of the Revolution. This issue, combined with
the resentment felt in Western circles over the activities of the Comintern,
served to delay general diplomatic recognition of the new Soviet regime.
The first partial breach of the deadlock occurred, in April 1922, during
the Genoa Conference, when the German government, still smarting
under the strictures of the Versailles Treaty and anxious to ensure that
Russia should not appear among the claimants on German reparations,
broke ranks and concluded with the Soviet government the Rapallo
Treaty, by the terms of which both parties relinquished all claims against
the other and regular diplomatic relations were re-established. This
weakened the position of the other Western powers in demanding debt
settlements as a prerequisite to recognition. In January of 1924 the
German example was followed by the Italians and the British (for quite
different reasons in each case), and then by a whole series of other
governments. In none of these instances was there any insistence on a
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prior debt settlement. This general movement of recognition included
China and Japan, and involved the final departure (1925) of Japanese
troops from the last bit of Soviet territory on which they had remained
after 1922 — the northern part of the island of Sakhalin. (A notable excep-
tion here was of course the U.S.A., which did not recognise the Soviet
regime until 1933.) Generally speaking, it is thus possible to say that the
general acceptance of the Soviet Union as a member of the international
community, and the extensive normalisation of its relations with other
great powers, coincided roughly in time with Lenin’s death and the resolu-
tion of the succession crisis.
Hand in hand with these developments, not unsuitably, went the con-
solidation of the structure of the Soviet state into a single entity — the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — under a new constitution, formally
confirmed by the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 January
1924. The mid-i920s thus found the new Soviet state not only rapidly
recovering, economically, from the ravages of war, revolution and civil
war, but also constitutionally consolidated, emerging without instability
from its first great crisis of personal leadership, and generally accepted
into the international community; and, with this, the crucial period of
trial and readjustment following upon the Revolution and the Civil War
may be said to have come generally to an end.
A further three years would have to elapse, however, before the main
domestic trends of this period — Stalin’s successful struggle against the
radical opposition (of Trotsky and Kamenev-Zinoviev) within the Party
and the recovery of economic life — would reach their final culmination.
After the smashing of their organisational strength within the Party,
Kamenev and Zinoviev moved belatedly — much too late, in fact — to make
their peace with Trotsky and to join forces with him, and with other
Leftist elements within the Party, in the struggle against Stalin. From the
summer of 1926 to the end of 1927, the Party was racked with the intrigues
and polemics that attended this conflict. The leaders of what now emerged
— the so-called ‘United Opposition’ — were organisationally helpless, but
their prestige was great throughout the world Communist movement, both
within and without Russia. Their platform was one that called for a
reversal of the NEP, an early end to concessions to the peasantry and to
private enterprise, a programme of rapid, intensive industrialisation, and
an aggressive programme of revolutionary activity elsewhere, through the
agency of the Comintern. Stalin, superior to them all in tactical skill,
easily outmanoeuvred them, and eventually brought about their expulsion
from the Party and physical banishment from Moscow. But this took time;
it was not fully accomplished until the turn of the year 1927-8. (Trotsky
was forcibly exiled from Moscow to Kazakhstan in January 1928 and a
year later deported entirely from the Soviet Union.) From the end of 1 927,
opposition from the Left was no longer seriously a thorn in Stalin's side.
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The recovery of the economy had proceeded, meanwhile, at a generally
satisfactory pace. By 1927 the quantitative production figures had either
reached or were approaching pre-war levels. There were of course varia-
tions. Heavy metallurgy lagged behind. Electrification, on the other hand,
had advanced well beyond anything achieved before the Revolution.
In so far as one can judge from a somewhat confused and inadequate
statistical background, agriculture too had largely, if not entirely, com-
pleted its recovery from the vicissitudes of the revolutionary period.
Grain crops were now r unnin g in the neighbourhood of 80-90 per cent of
the pre-war level, although the proportion of grain that could be brought
on to the market and made available for non-rural consumption and for
export fell considerably below the pre-war figure. Quality, to be sure, had
not kept pace with quantity in the general process of recovery; and an
increase of population (some 5-6 per cent over 1913) reduced the per
capita significance of the 1927 levels of production. But it could fairly be
said that by 1927 the advance of the Soviet economy, under the stimulus
of the NEP, had reached a point where the outstanding problems of policy
were no longer those of the restoration of production but rather those of
determining along what lines further investment and development were to
proceed. This raised new and momentous problems of policy.
The platform of the United Opposition was one that called in effect for
an immediate and intensive effort to socialise the non-agrarian sector of
the economy and to complete the industrialisation of the country — an
undertaking that could proceed, obviously, only at the expense of the
NEP. It wholly excluded the possibility that the economic development
of the country should continue to proceed along lines that conceded
permanency of status to any form of free enterprise. There is no evidence
that Stalin was at any time opposed on principle to these views. But he
evidently disagreed with the Opposition on certain points of timing, and
was reluctant to change his course entirely before the Opposition had been
crushed to a point where it could no longer take credit for the change.
Until the end of 1927, he clung to a cautious middle ground, leaving it to
Bukharin and other leaders of the future ‘Right Opposition’ to carry
forward the more radical and enthusiastic defense of the NEP, while he
himself moved quietly, in his skilful fashion, to take the edge off the
arguments of the Left by limi ted concessions to its various demands.
The attacks levied against Stalin by the Left Opposition in these final
years of its political vitality were by no means restricted to domestic
policy. The criticisms directed to his handling of external affairs were if
anything even more vehement and telling. The de jure diplomatic relations
now established with the leading Western European countries had brought
small profit to the Soviet leadership. Although the demands of the Western
powers for debt settlements were no longer seriously pressed, long-term
credits were, in the absence of such debt settlements, also not forthcoming.
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The Soviet leaders had placed particularly high hopes on their relations
with the German government. These relations had been fortified, since
1921, by clandestine arrangements of mutual convenience in the field of
military collaboration. It had been the Soviet hope that German bitterness
over the Versailles settlement would serve to produce that irreparable
division among the leading Western nations on which prospects for the
advancement of the world Communist cause were so largely predicated.
But such hopes were premature. The stabilisation that occurred in Ger-
many’s relations with the Western powers in the period following the
French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, a stabilisation marked by the
acceptance of the Dawes Plan, the creation of a stable German currency,
conclusion of the Locarno treaties, and finally the admission of Germany
to the League of Nations, made it clear that the Germans had no intention
of basing their international position exclusively on the relationship with
Moscow — that this tie was valuable, in fact, in German eyes primarily as a
bargaining factor in Germany’s dealings with other Western countries.
Relations with Britain developed even more unsatisfactorily. The effect
of the de jure recognition extended by the Labour government of Ramsay
MacDonald in early 1924 was largely nullified when that government fell
from power, in the autumn of that year, as a result of the so-called
Zinoviev Letter incident. Efforts conducted by the ensuing Conservative
government to negotiate a debt settlement were unsuccessful. Ambassa-
dors, consequently, were not exchanged. The already unhappy relationship
was subjected to added strain by the resentment felt in Britain over the
Soviet attitude towards the British General Strike of 1926. A year later,
in May 1927, the British government broke off relations entirely, giving
as its reason the results of a raid conducted by the British authorities on
the premises of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London. It was 1930 before
this new breach could be even formally healed.
In the Far East, an even more bitter disillusionment was suffered when
the young and weak Chinese Communist party, attempting pursuant to
Moscow’s orders to co-operate with the Kuomintang in attacking the
positions of the Western powers, was brutally crushed by the very political
faction with which it was endeavouring to co-operate. This chapter of
Soviet foreign relations is much too confused, and too full of baffling
subtleties, to permit of any clear historical verdict as to personal blame
for the disaster. But the United Opposition criticised Stalin savagely for
his part in it, and drove him for a time sorely on to the defensive.
When the final crushing of the Left Opposition in 1927 liberated Stalin
from harassment from the Left, the effects of these various disappoint-
ments and frustrations in external relations became clearly evident in his
behaviour. Over an ensuing period of some years, he observed a marked
caution and restraint in foreign policy, giving his attention primarily to
domestic affairs and not hesitating to subordinate foreign to domestic
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considerations. On the Comintern level, sensitive to charges that he had
lacked enthusiasm for the cause of world revolution, he set himself against
all forms of collaboration with non-Communist elements, both national-
istic anti-imperialistic movements in Asia and the moderate socialist parties
in Western Europe. At the same time he took the apparatus of the Comin-
tern under closest personal control (lest it become another weapon of the
Opposition against him) and used it primarily to further the national
interests of the Soviet Union rather than those of world revolution. On
the normal diplomatic level, he made no deliberate attempt to destroy the
newly established diplomatic relations with the Western powers, but his
behaviour showed that he placed little value on them. Three times in the
period 1928-33, he strained Russia’s relations with the governments of
Germany, France and England, respectively, by staging propaganda
trials, designed to shift to those governments and their agents the blame
for various negative and embarrassing phenomena in Soviet life. In each
case, when it was clear that things had gone too far, he made grudging
concessions. But it evidently caused him no great concern that these
abuses brought German-Soviet relations almost to the breaking point in
1928, or that in 1933 they caused the British to establish and maintain for
a time an economic embargo against trade with the Soviet Union. He
plainly considered that, in the disposition of these governments towards
itself, the Soviet regime had little to lose.
It was not, however, in the foreign but rather in the domestic field that
Stalin, once freed of serious pressure from the Left Opposition, instituted
the most sensational and momentous changes in policy (see above, ch. m).
These changes included not only the rapid termination of the NEP, in the
sense of the suppression of the market economy in agriculture, in com-
merce and in industry, but also the physical destruction of the kulak class,
the suppression of private farming itself as the principal form of agri-
cultural organisation, the driving of most of the remaining peasantry into
collective farms, and the pursuit, on a scale and at a pace hitherto un-
dreamed of, of the goal of a total industrial and military autarky. That
Stalin would move some distance to meet the criticisms of the Left
Opposition, once its leaders had been placed in a position where they
could no longer take credit for such a change of course, could have sur-
prised no one. The programme actually put in hand, however, while
pointing precisely in the direction the Opposition leaders had demanded,
far exceeded in scope and in pace anything they had even envisaged. Not
only were contemporaries flabbergasted by the suddenness and extremism
of this change, but historians have been hard pressed to find the explana-
tion for it.
It is not difficult to perceive the attraction of the principle of collectivisa-
tion as a long-term solution to the agrarian problems faced by the Soviet
regime in the mid-i920S. Under the conditions of the NEP, in the absence,
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that is, of the resort by the regime to forceful and confiscatory measures
for the collection of grain, the independent peasantry could be induced to
part with its surpluses only at a price which appeared unacceptably high
in the eyes of the regime — unacceptably high not just in monetary terms
but especially in terms of the industrial output necessary to mop up the
resulting purchasing power. Particularly was this true of the wealthier
peasants. Not only did this drain on industrial output complicate the
accumulation of the capital needed to support an intensive programme of
industrialisation, but it left the regime with no certain control over the
supply of grain for the feeding of the cities and the army, for the accumu-
lation of military reserves, and for export. The unreliability of the open
market in this respect was dramatically demonstrated in the winter of
1927-8, when severe difficulties were encountered in grain collections,
and when it was estimated that something over two million tons were
being withheld by the peasants in the hope of a rise in the governmental
purchase price. It was clear, in these circumstances, that to continue to
look to the independent peasant, and particularly the stronger one, as the
principal source of urban food supply would be not only to tolerate a
continued growth in influence on the part of what was regarded as a
non-socialist element among the population, and to suffer a humiliating
dependence on that element for one of the most vital requirements of the
national economy, but also to forgo the possibility of a rapid industrialisa-
tion, and hence to remain in a position of military inferiority vis-a-vis
surrounding capitalist powers.
The logical answer appeared to be the reorganisation of the agricultural
process around collective associations of one sort or another in which the
use of machinery would be possible and in which the government, having
a higher degree of economic and administrative control, could have an
assured source of cheap grain for the urban food supply, for military
purposes, and for export.
There seems to be little doubt that this was the direction in which Stalin’s
thoughts, no less than those of the United Opposition, had been moving
throughout the period of the NEP; and by 1927 conditions seemed ripe for
more rapid progress in this direction. Until the end of 1919, however, the
official calculations as to the pace at which it would be possible to effect
such changes appear to have been relatively modest ones, envisaging the
collectivisation of only a small percentage of the peasantry in the course
of the next five years. (The First Five-Year Plan, approved in April 1929,
and originally conceived to apply to the period up to autumn 1933, called
for the collectivisation of only 18 6 per cent of the farming population.)
How it came about that these calculations were suddenly revised, at the
end of 1929, in favour of an intensive drive for the immediate collectivisa-
tion of the greater part of the peasantry, is still not entirely clear.
The activisation of policy towards the peasantry began in 1928, with
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a large-scale action designed to extract, either by sheer confiscation or at
very low prices and by use of force where necessary, the reserves of grain
then in the hands of the more well-to-do proprietors. The resistance of the
village to these measures was violent — more violent, apparently, than had
been expected — and not entirely confined to the wealthier peasants.
Plainly, the regime had seriously underestimated the solidarity of the
village community in defence of the gains of the NEP. In the face of this
situation, the campaign soon took on, in many places, the character of a
conflict with the village as a whole.
Such developments were bound to cause tension between Stalin and the
right wing of the Party. So long as he needed their support against the
United Opposition, Stalin had co-existed relatively easily with Bukharin,
Tomski, Rykov and the other Rightist leaders. The attack on the peasantry
brought this co-existence to an end and unleashed a conflict scarcely less
dramatic than the one recently conducted with the opposition groups on
the Left. In some respects, this conflict was for Stalin the most difficult
he had faced, for the Rightist position enjoyed some sympathy even among
the ranks of his hand-picked personal supporters.
Here again, Stalin reacted by proceeding, skilfully and gradually, to
destroy the political and personal positions of his leading opponents. But
once more this took time. It was not until the autumn of 1929 that
Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski had been driven from the senior Party
bodies and forced to make public recantation of the views they had held
against him.
Once the Rightist leaders had been thus disposed of, Stalin moved
without delay to achieve not only the final and total ‘liquidation of the
kulaks as a class’ but the immediate wholesale collectivisation, voluntary
or otherwise, of the greater part of the remaining peasantry. The drive for
these objectives was carried forward, with reckless brutality, during the
winter of 1930. It involved the destruction, social or physical or both, of
the whole of the more vigorous and competent portion of the peasantry,
to the number of several millions of people; most of them were deported,
under conditions that often fell little short of capital punishment, to
forced labour in remote parts of the country. Peasant resistance was
violent. The disruption brought to village life was enormous. Of particular
gravity was the depletion of the livestock holdings. This was a consequence
partly of deliberate slaughter by peasants reluctant to give up their animals
to a common herd, partly of the losses from disease and neglect that
occurred when small and previously well-tended herds were hastily thrown
together into large aggregations. In this way the country lost within a year
or two some 60 per cent of its farm-animal population — a catastrophe not
just from the standpoint of food supply but also from the standpoint of the
draught power and fertiliser available to the new collectives.
So frightening were the consequences of the sudden drive for general
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collectivisation that by March 1930, only three months after its inaugura-
tion, Stalin found himself obliged to call for a slackening of the pace. No
sooner had this respite eased peasant resistance, however, than the pres-
sure was resumed. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan period, 1932-3,
some 60-65 per cent of the peasantry had been driven into the collectives.
For the remainder it was only a question of time. It is unnecessary to
emphasise that this development amounted to a new social revolution,
comparable in profundity to that which had occurred between 1917 and
1921, and involving for the great rural population adjustments even more
basic and drastic in their implications.
Hand in hand with this agrarian revolution-from-above there went a
large-scale and extremely intensive programme of industrial construction
and development, pursued with methods scarcely less violent. The initial
phase of this programme, occupying the years 1 92 8-3 2, came to be known to
the world public as the First Five-Year Plan. Actually, this Five-Year Plan
represented merely a listing of the various economic goals it was hoped to
achieve over the period in question. Current direction and co-ordination of
the process of industrialisation was effected, in so far as it was effected at
all, by the day-to-day decisions of the ruling party organs, for which the
original five-year estimates had no binding quality. It is evident that the
First Five-Year Plan, as indeed the second and third ones that followed it,
served in actuality as the external facade for an unpublished programme
of military industrialisation, designed primarily to place the Soviet eco-
nomy at the earliest possible time in a position of independence of foreign
sources of supply in weaponry and military hardware of every sort.
In so far as the stated goals of the First Five-Year Plan are concerned,
it can be said only that some were achieved, one or twowere over-achieved,
some were not achieved at all. The figure of 87 per cent, claimed by Stalin
as the level of accomplishment of the planned objectives, is statistically
meaningless (since it purports to strike an average out of values not
mutually comparable) and gives a serious misimpression. A sampling of
various indices would suggest that the overall level of fulfilment of the
original objectives was closer to 50 than to 87 per cent. What was accom-
plished was the hasty construction of a great deal of new industrial plant,
and, roughly speaking, a doubling of industrial production in quantitative
terms. Qualitative standards, on the other hand, declined seriously over
the period envisaged in the plan, as did labour efficiency. A great deal of
the new plant was hastily planned, poorly geared to its economic environ-
ment, and shoddy in construction. No adequate indices of depreciation are
available, but this must have been so rapid as to reduce greatly the value
of what had been built, and to call for the replacement of much of it at an
unduly early date.
What was achieved in the way of industrialisation between 1928 and
1933 was indeed formidable in scale. It constituted an important first step
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along the desired path towards military-industrial self-sufficiency. Involving
as it did the selection of the Urals and western Siberia as centres for new
construction in the metallurgical industry (notably the great new steel
plants at Kuznetsk and Magnitogorsk), it laid the foundation for the major
shift of heavy industry to the strategically protected interior regions that
was to continue through later years and to be greatly intensified by the
experiences of the second world war. But the costs of this great programme,
in terms of waste, depreciation, inflated production costs, and depression
of living standards, were enormous. It is difficult to believe that this was
really the best, or indeed the only, way in which the general objectives of
the First Five-Year Plan could have been achieved.
By 1932, as a consequence of what had been done in both agricultural
and industrial fields, conditions in Russia were again appalling : worse than
at any time since 1922. A large part of the peasantry was now, to be sure,
formally collectivised. Yet overall grain production was still below the
1913 level and had shown no significant improvement. On the other hand,
the percentage of the crop extracted annually from the peasantry, and
made available for urban and military use, had increased. The livestock
losses were of such an order that several years would have been required,
even in the best of circumstances, to replenish the herds. The disruption
of the agricultural process by the ‘dekulakisation’ and collectivisation
campaigns had led, furthermore, by 1932 to a new famine in the main
grain-growing regions, a famine of such seriousness as to take the lives
of an estimated three to four million people and to raise the usual problems
of depletion of seed grain. Rationing had had to be reintroduced in the
cities and industrial communities. Meanwhile, nothing effective had been
done to relieve the painful shortage of urban housing, now aggravated by
the importation of new labour by the millions into the industrial com-
munities; and the entire transportation system was overburdened to the
point of breakdown. Hardship and suffering from depressed living stan-
dards were virtually universal.
Such conditions could not fail to find reflection on the political scene.
Conducive as they were to the suspicion on the part of many senior people
in the Party that the country was headed for a complete breakdown along
the lines of 1917, they caused a number of the former oppositionists to
endeavour to re-establish contact with one another and to try to re-create
some semblance of political organisation, in order to be prepared for all
eventualities. These efforts escaped neither the vigilance of the secret
police nor the vengeful, secretive resentment of Stalin. More serious still
was the fact that misgivings were now being aroused even among the
ranks of those who up to this time had been Stalin’s faithful supporters
in the senior ranks of the Party. Such disaffection among the ranks of
senior Stalinists, a factor which had already complicated the crushing of
the Right Opposition in 1928 and 1929, was intensified by the hardships
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and reverses of 1932. There was a feeling that the cruelties of collectivisa-
tion had been excessive; that things had been driven too far and too fast;
that too much brutality had been used ; that even the working class was
being alienated. There was a strong demand throughout the Party hier-
archy for the introduction of a new note of humanity into the Party line:
for the manifestation of a new concern for the feelings and the dignity of
the individual citizen. This feeling found its moral epicentre in the writer
Maxim Gorki; but it was to Sergei Kirov, Politburo member and Party
chief in Leningrad, that people looked to give it expression on the political
level. Although Kirov had made his career as a loyal follower of Stalin,
he was widely believed to share, by this time, the general concern over the
extremism of Stalin’s recent policies.
It was in the midst of these stresses and strains, and probably not
unconnected with them, that there occurred, in November of the unhappy
year 1932, the sudden death of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. This
event marked an important turning-point in the development of Stalin’s
personality. One notes just at this time in the historical record a marked
increase in that exaggerated suspiciousness and ruthless vindictiveness,
particularly with relation to persons in his own political entourage, to
which Stalin had always been inclined, and which was now, in its patho-
logical form, to plague the life of the Party and the country down to his
dying day. It appears to have been at approximately this time that he
began to demand the application of the death penalty against leading
members of the various past opposition movements.
At this same time, Russia’s international position, after some years of
relative quiescence, became complicated by two new factors of great
importance, both of which were destined to have a determining effect on
Soviet foreign policy down to the second world war. The first of these was
the advent of the National Socialists to power in Germany. Not only did
this put an end to the pattern of German-Soviet relations that had en-
dured since conclusion of the Rapallo Treaty ten years earlier, including
the clandestine military arrangements, but it added to the difficulty of
Stalin’s personal position by rendering him vulnerable to the well-founded
charge that, by his stubborn refusal to permit the German Communists
to form a united front with the Social-Democrats in the preceding period,
he had actually eased Hitler’s path to power.
The second new factor was the conquest of Manchuria by the Japanese.
This constituted a serious threat to Russia’s military and strategic interests
in the Far East. Being in no position at that moment to risk a military
conflict, least of all on the Far Eastern borders, yet aware that any ex-
cessive conciliatoriness would merely whet the Japanese territorial appetite,
the Soviet government compromised. It abandoned (through sale of the
Chinese Eastern Railway in 1935 to Manchurian puppets of the Japanese)
its claim, inherited from the tsars, to a special political position in the
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Manchurian region. At the same time, it adopted an attitude of uncom-
promising firmness and vigilance in defence of the state frontiers of Siberia,
and also of Outer Mongolia, which had long been a virtual Soviet pro-
tectorate. From this moment on, down to the final defeat of Japan in the
Pacific War, the threat posed by the presence of strong Japanese forces
along the sensitive borders of Siberia and Mongolia would be a constant
source of apprehension to the Soviet leaders and one never absent from
their thoughts and calculations as they addressed themselves to the prob-
lems confronting them from the European side.
These new factors were, as it happened, ones that affected United States
interests scarcely less adversely than those of the Soviet Union. This,
together with the accession of Franklin Roosevelt to the Presidency in
1933, established the preconditions for a breaking of the long diplomatic
deadlock between the American and Soviet governments. Diplomatic
relations, after an interruption of sixteen years, were resumed at the end
of 1933. As in the case of Britain ten years earlier, the Soviet leaders,
having won recognition without making significant concessions in the
field of debts and claims, saw no reason to make such concessions once
recognition had been obtained. The result, again, was that their hopes for
major long-term credits were disappointed. Soviet-American relations,
after much initial excitement, soon lapsed into a generally low and un-
happy key. But the event took some of the sting out of Hitler’s recent
advance to power, and no doubt eased the change of Soviet policy which
then ensued.
Faced with the threat of a general sweep of fascism over Europe, a threat
highlighted by the evidences of great political tension in France in 1934,
Moscow now reversed its position and began to encourage Communist
elements in western Europe to unite their efforts with those of moderate-
socialist and liberal groups in opposing the advance of fascism. Under
Litvinov’s able direction as Foreign Minister, far-reaching changes were
introduced, during the period from 1933 to 1936, into Soviet relations
with other Western countries. The Soviet Union entered the League of
Nations, which its leaders had heretofore denounced as an agency of
imperialism. Military alliances, ultimately ineffective but perhaps not
momentarily without some small political effect, were concluded with
France and with Czechoslovakia. These moves had, as their object, the
checking or deflecting of an eventual German move towards the east.
Meanwhile, however, strange things were happening on the Soviet
internal scene. With the completion of the First-Five-Year-Plan period,
at the end of 1932, the pace of industrialisation and collectivisation was
somewhat relaxed; economic life responded to this relaxation; and there
was a corresponding — but still very relative — improvement in living con-
ditions. Stalin, at the same time, as if to meet the demands for greater
moderation and humanity of policy at least with relation to the non-Party
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masses, permitted the preparation, and the promulgation in 1936, of a
new state constitution, ostensibly more liberal in spirit than the one it
replaced. Far from reflecting, however, any greater liberality in practice,
this document seems to have served primarily as a screen for something
of a wholly contrary character : namely, a new determination on Stalin’s
part to exploit to the full the sinister resources of the police establishment
with a view to stamping out not only every trace of past or existing
resistance but even every remote possibility of resistance to his absolute
personal rule, and to do this even if it had to involve the use of terror
against the Party itself. Evidences of this tendency, increasing steadily in
frequency and insistence in the period after 1932, naturally brought con-
sternation to other senior Party figures and caused them to search for
means of mutual defence. In this way Stalin’s terror, originally conceived
as a weapon against those who might have opposed him on other grounds,
served to heighten the very contumacy it was designed to chastise and now
became a weapon against those as well who had the temerity to challenge
the desirability of the terror itself.
There is evidence that at the XVIIth Party Congress, in January 1934,
Stalin met with some sort of opposition or rebuff at the hands of his senior
colleagues in the Party. Kirov, in any case, appears to have been greeted
by the members of the Congress with a deference, if not enthusiasm,
which could not have failed to have aroused Stalin’s ready jealousy and
suspicion. Kirov, furthermore, was elected by the Congress to a key posi-
tion on the Party’s Secretariat: an appointment which presaged his early
abandonment of the Leningrad post and removal to the central apparatus
in Moscow. Before any such change could be implemented, however, and
at a time, actually, when it seems to have been quite imminent, Kirov was
murdered (in Leningrad, 1 December 1934). All that has become known,
at the time and subsequently, of the background of this assassination points
to a complicity somewhere in the higher echelons of the Leningrad police
headquarters ; and there have been suggestions that Stalin himself was not
uninvolved in the affair. However that may be, Stalin exploited the develop-
ment as an excuse for the launching of that extraordinary process of
decimation of the existing official establishment of the country, not just
in the Party but in the army, in intellectual life, and elsewhere, which
went by the name of the ‘purges’ of the ’thirties. In so far as it had any
specific focus, this action seems to have been aimed primarily against the
old guard of the Party, particularly those whose experiences and memories
reached back into the pre-1917 period, and those who had taken positions
in opposition to Stalin during the ’twenties (in large measure, the two
categories coincided). Yet the range of victims was by no means limited
to Party members.
The purges had two evident purposes — closely related but distinguish-
able. One was the physical destruction of all those leading Communists
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who had opposed Stalin in earlier years. These were arrested and sub-
jected to the full rigour of such pressures, psychic and physical, as a
ruthless police system is capable of bringing to bear on an isolated and
helpless prisoner. Those who could not be broken to the point where they
were prepared to collaborate at their own humiliation by making public
confessions to false charges were simply executed secretly, without public
announcement. Those who could be induced to make such confessions
appeared as defendants in the three great purge trials of 1936-8, after
which they were, for the most part, executed on the strength of what they
had confessed. The ordeal was thus a part of their punishment rather than
an effort to establish their guilt.
The three trials followed closely the breakdown of the previous opposi-
tion groups, the first being devoted to Zinoviev and Kamenev and persons
close to them, the second, similarly, to the Trotskyites, the third to the
Right Opposition. They provided the pretext for the execution, among
others, of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Bukharin, Rykov, Yagodaand
Krestinski; but these represented only a small portion of the prominent
Communists who fell victim to the purges.
Beyond these obvious individual targets, the purges appear to have been
directed against entire categories of less prominent, but for the most part
influential, persons — evidently persons thought capable either of sym-
pathising with the leading victims or of being likely to form, tempera-
mentally, a favourable soil for future opposition activity. In most of these
cases, there was no question of any previous specific offence. The victims
were skilfully manoeuvred into assuming the main burden of their own
destruction. An atmosphere was deliberately created in which the irrespon-
sible denunciation of superiors or colleagues came to appear as the only
likely means of purchasing immunity to one’s own arrest and punishment,
and that of one’s family. As the process got under way, the offices of the
secret police became literally inundated with such denunciations, and the
prisons with their victims. The procedures by which such people were
arrested and sentenced can scarcely even be called a mockery of justice, for
in many instances no attempt was made to observe even the most elemen-
tary judicial formalities. Each new arrest widened the circle of suspicion
and denunciation and multiplied the number of victims. Before the process
was halted (in late 1938, presumably in view of the growing danger of war),
hundreds of thousands of people, numbers running in fact into the millions,
had been either executed or driven off to prisons and labour camps under
conditions in which the chances of any long and successful survival were
poor. Even where death did not ensue, the effects on personality and
physique were such as to deprive life, in many cases, of much of its meaning.
Although not all of the inhabitants of the labour camps at that time were
victims of the purges of the ’thirties, the fact that by the end of the
’thirties the total population of the camps obviously ran into millions
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gives some idea of the extent of the terror. And the effect on the Party
itself may be gauged from Krushchev’s revelation, at the XXIInd Party
Congress, that the majority of the delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress
of 1934, ostensibly the supreme body of the Party and of the land, were
slaughtered off before another Congress could be convened, in 1939.
It is amazing that this huge wave of terror had no greater effect than it
did on the life of the country at large. It was, of course, directed largely
against members of the establishment ; and there were usually ambitious
underlings waiting to take their places. Simple people, particularly those
who, like the peasants, had already suffered and survived their own en-
counters and conflicts with the regime, were relatively little affected; and
foreign observers had the impression that many of them witnessed with
no more than an embittered apathy this astounding process of self-
destruction among their betters. Economic life, in any case, was not
markedly set back, although here too there must have been some negative
effect, if only from the disruption and high turnover of senior manage-
ment. The Second and Third Five-Year Plans, less strenuously ambitious
than the First, were relatively successfully promulgated. By 1939, living
standards, except on the farms, had again advanced at least to the 1926-7
levels, and industrial production had increased several times over. Much
of the increased industrial output went for military purposes, with the
result that the Red Army was by 1939 extensively modernised in point of
equipment and training. Its morale and efficiency had suffered, however,
from the depredations of the purges; depredations that had affected not
just the galaxy of marshals whose execution in 1937 so shocked the Russian
and world public, but also a formidable number (probably about half) of
the members of the senior officers’ corps in general.
The years of 1936-8, which constituted the high point of the purges,
were also marked with new trends in Soviet foreign policy. It is not to be
excluded, in fact, that the two phenomena were importantly connected.
By the middle of 1936 it had become abundantly clear to Soviet policy-
makers that the Western powers, having acquiesced in Hitler’s destruction
of the Versailles Treaty and the German reoccupation of the Rhineland,
would not be likely to oppose by force of arms any future expansion of
German power to the east. Neither the moral support of the League of
Nations nor the provisions of the Franco-Russian Pact could be expected
to suffice for overcoming this lethargy.
This lesson was further driven home by the reactions of the various
powers to the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet government at first adhered
to the agreement arrived at among the powers for non-intervention in this
conflict. When it became clear, however, as it did in the first weeks of the
war, that the Germans and Italians were not prepared to respect this agree-
ment, the Soviet government declined to be further bound by it and
proceeded (October 1936) to give important military aid to the Republican
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cause. Air and tank units were dispatched. The initial defence of Madrid,
in particular, seems to have owed its success largely to Soviet leadership
and assistance. But, when it became clear that this example was not to
be followed by the Western powers, that their role was to be a passive
one and that they would not take serious steps to prevent a Nationalist
victory, Moscow began to lose interest and to curtail its commitment.
Signs of this loss of interest can be detected in the historical record as early
as the first months of 1937 ; and it is not by accident that they were followed
shortly by similar signs of an emerging interest on Moscow’s part in
arriving at some sort of a deal with Hitler — a deal which at best would
turn the edge of the latter’s ambitions westward and involve him in a war
with the Western powers, and at worst would delay any German attack
on the Soviet Union proper. Evidences of this purpose were clearly visible
some time before the Munich agreement. They reflected not only growing
doubt as to whether the Western powers could be induced to react with
military means in the event of further German expansion to the east, but
also a lively awareness of the delicate situation prevailing on the Man-
churian-Mongolian frontier and a determination not to become involved,
if this could possibly be avoided, in a two-front war with the Japanese and
the Germans, from which the Western powers could remain aloof.
It is true that at the Munich Conference, and even later, in the abortive
negotiations of the summer of 1939 with the British and'French, the Soviet
government maintained at all times a stance of readiness to oppose any
further Nazi expansionism by force of arms, provided only the Western
powers would do likewise. But the significance of this stance was weakened
by the fact that Russia had no common border with Nazi Germany,
whereas the Western powers in effect did. The pressures exerted by Moscow
on the Western powers for joint military action against Hitler were in-
variably, and not unnaturally, accompanied by demands for the right of
passage of Soviet forces across the territories of Rumania, Poland and the
Baltic states. But this was a prospect which the governments of those
countries regarded as scarcely less dangerous to their independence and
security than the expansionism of the Nazis. That Russia would gladly
have made a token contribution to a war against Hitler at the time of
Munich, had the British and French been willing to take up the gauntlet,
is clear. That she would, or indeed could, have done much more than this,
even in the event of the Rumanians and Poles permitting the passage of
Soviet troops, is doubtful, if only for geographical and other military
reasons. Had the Rumanians and Poles not permitted such passage — and
they resisted it to the end — the Russian obligation could have been
honoured with a regretful shrug of the shoulders. Moscow, in these circum-
stances, risked little by her outward enthusiasm for collective security
against Hitler.
This was the true background of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression
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Pact of August 1939. Even in the summer of 1939, the Soviet leaders
could perhaps have been prevailed upon (even this is not certain) to
reject the German overtures and to join the Western powers in a common
front against Hitler, if it could have been demonstrated to them that this
would lead the Western powers to put up serious military resistance to any
further German aggression ; but, even then, this was something they would
have consented to do only at a political price — namely, the establishment
of a position of military ascendancy over the eastern European countries —
which was unacceptable to the governments of those countries themselves
and which the Western Allies were unwilling, at that moment, to pay.
The Nazis, on the other hand, being less inhibited in disposing of the
territory of others, were not adverse to offering to Moscow momentary
gains (the occupation and incorporation into the Soviet Union of eastern
Poland and the Baltic countries) which could presumably be easily nullified
by a German attack if and when the resistance of the Western powers
had been crushed. In these circumstances, Stalin opted for the German
card, and agreed, in the secret protocol of the Non-Aggression Pact, to
what was in effect a partition of eastern Europe with the Nazis. He
presumably achieved, by this means, a delay in the necessity of facing
Hitler’s armies on the field of battle. He gained some space, to be traded
for time, when the day of the German attack arrived. He succeeded in
forestalling, at a particularly dangerous juncture, any further Japanese
aggression against the eastern frontiers of Soviet power. But he forfeited,
by the same token, whatever value the Polish, Rumanian and Baltic
armies might have had, under proper encouragement, as supplementary
impediments to the German military and political advance. He also
brought, by the abruptness of the move, the greatest bewilderment to his
admirers and followers in other countries throughout the world. Whether
the net result was positive or negative is a question that will long be
debated.
By August 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, twenty-two
years of Soviet power had brought momentous changes to the Russian and
other peoples of the traditional Russian territory.
The population of the territory comprising the pre-1939 U.S.S.R. had
risen from approximately 140 to 170 million. (It would presumably have
risen by some ten to twenty million more had it not been for the civil
conflict, the political persecutions, the man-made famines and the other
hardships by which this period had been studded.) The rural population
had shown no growth at all ; that of the urban and industrial centres had
more than doubled.
In agriculture — the pursuit that still claimed the energies of the greater
part of the population — conditions of ownership and management had
been thoroughly revolutionised. The traditional structure of the Russian
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village had been fundamentally altered. All but a negligible fraction of the
peasantry was now employed either on state farms or on collective farms
subject in reality to governmental control. Despite a 28 per cent increase
in the population to be fed, output in major crops barely exceeded the
1913 level. The regime, on the other hand, was taking a higher proportion
(34 per cent as opposed to 15 per cent) of the grain harvests for urban use.
Livestock population, and with it the amount of draft power and fertiliser
available to the agricultural sector, had still not fully recovered from the
disaster of hasty collectivisation. It was evident that the regime, in intro-
ducing and retaining the system of collectivisation, had settled for a lower
gross output of Russian agriculture in return for the privilege of having
a larger control of what there was of it, of taking a larger proportion of it
for urban and military use, and of taking that portion at a price determined
by itself and not by the operation of a free market. The party could also
have, for what comfort this was, the satisfaction of having ‘socialised’,
at whatever cost, the agricultural process, and of having thus brought the
great mass of the peasantry, for the first time, into an acceptable theoretical
relationship to Marxist goals.
In industry a different situation obtained. There can be no disputing the
impressive magnitude of the progress made, during the decade preceding
the outbreak of the war, in providing Russia with the basic sinews of
industrial strength. Statistics are neither adequate nor reliable for purposes
of comparison; but selected key indices, such as those for iron and steel,
suggest something like an average industrial growth rate of some 12-15 per
cent, during the period since 1927, and a fourfold rise in productivity.
This growth was, to be sure, not well balanced. Housing had been neg-
lected, as had transportation. It is doubtful that living standards were,
on balance, higher in 1939 than in 1913. The goal of military self-suffi-
ciency, as the coming war was to show, had not been fully attained,
though it was now no longer remote. Judged as an effort of military
industrialisation, what had been accomplished in the 1930s was remark-
able, and all the more so for the fact that it was carried through almost
exclusively on the financial resources of the country itself, without resort
to the long-term borrowing in foreign markets on which Russian in-
dustrialisation had been so extensively dependent in the pre-revolutionary
period. The cost, on the other hand, had been great — in human mortality
and in human discomfort. It is not too much to say that the well-being of
an entire generation had been sacrificed to make possible this achievement.
No statistical computation alone will ever strike the balance.
In cultural and spiritual fields, too, the life of the people had been
profoundly affected. Education had made great strides (though no greater,
it should be noted, than those that would have been made had the trends
of the final years of tsardom been projected to this time). The role of the
church in formal education had been wholly destroyed (not that it had
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ever been of major importance even prior to the Revolution) and the
regime had done all in its power to destroy religious belief as well. But in
the cities perhaps half of the people, and in the countryside even more,
were still having recourse to the sacraments to dignify the great occasions
of personal life; and a smaller but not insignificant number still went to
church.
Twenty-two years of intensive ideological indoctrination had not been
without effect on people's minds. The desirability of socialism, in the sense
of governmental ownership and control of industry, was widely accepted.
The collective farm system, on the other hand, remained odious to a large
majority of those obliged to take part in it. By and large — as a result,
not least, of the discouragement and disillusionment produced by the
purges — the Marxist-Leninist ideology was losing its magic and its
mystery. In the reactions, particularly, of the youth, it was passing from
the status of a new and startling inspiration to that of a stultified state
religion, increasingly inadequate as an answer to the problems — particu-
larly the personal problems — of daily life.
In neither the intellectual nor the artistic fields had there been, over these
twenty-two years, any lack of talented and earnest effort ; but creativity,
in every branch of art and science, had suffered precisely in the measure
that it became the object of the attentions and ministrations of Party
ideologists. The exact sciences, relatively resistant to ideological inter-
pretation, carried on without serious difficulty; the social sciences, on the
other hand, were grievously restrained and in some instances almost
destroyed. Russian literature retained during the 1920s much of that
extraordinary vitality that had sustained it over the preceding century;
but the spirit and discipline of the purges were dreadfully unkind to
literary creativity, and forced much of what was left of it to go under-
ground. The theatre too maintained at all times its formidable technical
strength and its great popularity as a form of artistic expression; but in
the 1930s dramaturgy suffered along with the rest of literature, and the
theatre shared this loss. The ballet, enjoying an almost total immunity
from ideological harassment, carried on exuberantly as the great representa-
tional art of the Russian people; yet, even here, repertoire became in-
creasingly stereotyped as the purges gradually throttled artistic initiative,
and performances tended to take on the character of traditional ceremonies
rather than that of a living art. Everywhere one could see, by 1939, the
unfortunate effects of the extreme isolation from the major intellectual and
aesthetic currents of the international community — an isolation which
had varied in intensity, over the years, with the severity of the dictatorship,
but had always exceeded the normal as well as the desirable, and had been
carried finally, during the purges, to an extremity that had no parallel in
the experience of modem European civilisation.
All in all, the Russian people found themselves, as the second world war
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broke out, still in the midst of a process of profound social and economic
change. In many ways, the progress made had been impressive. In parti-
cular the country had achieved, by dint of almost superhuman effort, and
for the first time in its history, something close to military-economic self-
sufficiency. But the achievement had involved an increasing, and finally
almost total, regimentation of life. The cost had been measured not just
in the comforts but also in the liberties of the people, and above all in
their sense of identity and intimacy with the purposes of the regime. The
loss in spontaneity, in individual initiative, in self-confidence, and in self-
reliance, had been proportionate to the rigours of dictatorship. Fresh from
the employment of terror on a sickening scale, the regime had no difficulty,
now, in compelling the automatic obedience of those subject to its
authority; but it would require, as the near future was to show, the
challenge of external attack by an arrogant and contemptuous enemy to
rouse this great and talented people once again to a spirit of real unity,
and to fuse its spontaneous energies and enthusiasms with those of the
regime in another great national undertaking.
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I n the Europe of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century, the
political society of the greatest vitality was that of the German Empire.
United within the curious federal framework provided by Bismarck,
the Germans displayed different levels of political development, sharp
social contrasts and conflicts, and yet a dominant centripetal tendency.
The kingdom of Prussia extended from Aachen to Memel, from Flensburg
to Kattowitz, right across the map of the new Germany: two-thirds, in-
deed, of the Germans were technically Prussians, and Prussia embraced
the coalfields both of the Rhineland and of Silesia. The Prussian Landtag
was elected according to the Three-Class system which gave far more
representation, as well as strong administrative influence over the elections
(which were indirect), to the rich. In the south-west public opinion was
more justly mirrored in the Chambers of Baden, Wtirttemberg and Bavaria,
as it was in those of the northern city-states of Hamburg, Bremen and
Liibeck : Bavaria, after Prussia the biggest member of the Federal Empire,
had special rights of her own, and headed the Catholic minority interest
against the Lutheranism of Berlin and the north. 1 The life of the ordinary
German depended primarily upon the authority of the state in which he
lived rather than on the imperial authority: he paid direct taxes for
instance to the state of Prussia or Bavaria and only indirect taxes to the
empire.
The Reichstag or Imperial Lower Chamber was elected by universal
suffrage for men of 25 and over. It could legislate only in conjunction with
the Bundesrat (which represented the member-states) and the emperor.
It could criticise, but not control, policy. For Germany in 1900 was ruled
by a royal autocrat who nominated the chief Imperial Minister or Chan-
cellor: the Chancellor was responsible only to the emperor, not to the
Reichstag or Bundesrat, of which ministers were not members. The senior
civil service was provided by the landowning classes or their proteges;
it too was responsible to the emperor. Successive Chancellors took some
trouble to win the support of the deputies in the Reichstag, but they did
not need to do so as the Reichstag had no effective way of blocking
imperial expenditure, for instance on the army. When Biilow resigned in
the summer of 1909 the reason, whatever was said, was that he had fallen
out with the emperor, who chose the Secretary of State for the Interior,
Bethmann-Hollweg, to succeed him for personal reasons. The criticism
1 About 36 per cent of the whole population of the Hohenzollem empire was Roman
Catholic.
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of William’s interview in The Daily Telegraph in the previous year gave
the Reichstag an opportunity to assert itself which was not used.
The best thing to be said of the Germany of William II was that it was
a Rechtsstaat: it guaranteed the rule of law. The press, though used by the
government, was legally free, and the bureaucracy and judiciary incorrup-
tible. A good illustration of these statements is the case of Maximilian
Harden in 1907. Harden was a Jewish journalist of the kind German
society despised; in his paper, Die Zukunft, he had attacked friends of the
emperor’s as exerting bad influence at court because they were homo-
sexuals. When these people. Prince Eulenburg and Count Kuno von
Moltke, the City Commandant of Berlin, brought a case for libel against
Harden, in the first instance he won.
On the other hand the Rechtsstaat was all along menaced by the tortuous
characters of Bismarck and Biilow but above all by William II. The kaiser
had no serious regard for the constitution which gave him such tremendous
powers, and he seemed readier to be impressed by the verdict of the duel
than the verdict of the judge. He made the Germans familiar with noisy
threats of violence and Byzantine attitudes; he habitually spoke as if
political opponents deserved only to be persecuted. In his own intimate
circle the Reichstag was often derided as ‘the talking-shop’ and from time
to time a coup d'etat to abolish the Reichstag was contemplated.
Part of the emperor’s power depended upon the privileged position of
the army, whose General Staff never really accepted civilian control of
military policy any more than of military funds which were permanently
guaranteed. The officers, both senior and junior, were linked through
family connections with the big landowners and the higher bureaucracy.
The fact that every German had to do military service made him directly
aware of the power of the officer caste: it also brought the officers into a
certain contact with Socialists as individuals they commanded.
The rapid and accelerating industrialisation of Germany since 1870 had
brought increases and shifts of population and had transformed the country
from a mainly peasant to a markedly industrial society. The percentage
of the population living in towns rose from 47 in 1890 to 54-3 in 1900 and
60 in 1910. The new industrial employers had made every effort to identify
themselves with the old ruling class, whose power seemed thus to have
been rather fortified than not. In the universities, which were state institu-
tions whose technical value was appreciated, the big majority of the pro-
fessors at the beginning of this century were hotly nationalistic and, as
such, supporters of the existing social order; the students were dominated
by the various student Corps. Apart from their primitive habits of drinking
and duelling over supposed insults, many of these bodies had tremendous
snob value; they too were intensely nationalistic, mostly anti-Semitic,
and they regarded Socialism as equivalent to high treason. Thus clashes
between the student Corps and members of the rising Socialist trade
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unions were liable to occur in the many university towns. The bureaucracy
was largely staffed by the alte Herren or former members of the students’
Corps', if one wanted a good position later on, it was essential to have the
scars of a students’ duel on one’s face. In romantic revolt against the
rigid organisation and the stiff conventions of the ruling classes a certain
number of young people joined youth movements and became Wander-
vogel. This was in the spirit of art nouveau — called Jugendstil in German —
and proved surprisingly sterile : ‘ Back to Nature’ seemed to lead nowhere.
It is well known that Bismarck had tried to buy off the new industrial
working class with a limited amount of social insurance, while seeking to
crush those of its leaders who demanded more than this. In practice his
methods emphasised the gulf between the classes and drove protesters
towards Marxist socialism: German society seemed to them clearly to
illustrate the dogma of the class war. In 1900 factory workers were still
treated rather like military conscripts and the most powerful employers,
such as the coal-king Emil Kirdorf, still tried to penalise trade union
activity in the Rhineland.
Krupp’s great iron concern at Essen was organised on patriarchal lines
while the Saar coal mines, closely linked with the iron ore of Lorraine,
were dominated by old Konig Stumm, 1 as the Baron was called, who died
in 1901 . The Saar miners were obliged to get his consent when they wished
to marry, as if they were serfs. In the Silesian coalfields many of the
workers were despised Poles who were just beginning to resent German
rule. The election of Korfanty to the Reichstag in 1903 as their spokesman
for the mining town of Kattowitz expressed this new feeling. Conditions
of work in eastern Germany were undoubtedly worse than in the west and
this caused a steady flow of population westwards to the Rhineland and
a fair amount of emigration overseas. The population of the German
Empire was 56-3 million in 1900, rising to nearly 67 millions in 1914.
Though not so rich by most standards as Great Britain, Germany was
expanding faster economically. Not unnaturally the German ruling classes
displayed an arrogant self-confidence which delighted in assertions of the
superiority of the German race. It is interesting to see how impressed
so sensible and honest a person as Frau von Spitzemberg was by Houston
Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century published in
1899: the critical attitude of the Juden und Literaten of Berlin made her
feel more uneasy. 2
Slowly and unsteadily nevertheless the ruling classes lost popularity in
the years between 1900 and 1914; thus their power was undermined.
Already in 1890 at the time of the fall of Bismarck the Socialists had gained
more votes that any other party, though owing to outdated constituency
1 Strictly speaking Freiherr von Stumm-Halberg, member of Reichstag and of Prussian
Herrenhaus; he had considerable influence with William II.
8 Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg (i960), p. 403.
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boundaries they only won 35 seats in the Reichstag: the Catholic Centre
party gained most deputies at that time. Thenceforward the Socialists
and the Centre were the two mass parties which, if they voted together
against the government, could record the numerical, if not the political,
strength of the opposition. Between the elections of 1890 and 1912 the
Centre on average had a block of 100 deputies, while the Socialists in 1912
won no seats out of a total of 391 in the Reichstag, thus passing to the
first place. During this period there were generally also about 40 Pro-
gressive deputies and about 30 representing the Danes, Alsatians and
Poles who were hostile to the German government. The Progressives were,
however, suspicious of the Socialists, although since Ebert had been
appointed its secretary in 1906, indeed earlier, the Socialist party had
shown itself predominantly revisionist. Thus criticism of the government,
both in the Reichstag and, more cautiously, in the press, was possible and
frequent and it grew in influence. Yet the system was pernicious because
criticism was divorced from responsibility, the more so since no one would
readily criticise who wished to keep in the favour of the authorities.
As in Hungary 1 education in Germany was offered only in the language
of the state. This alienated some three million Poles in West Prussia (or, to
the Poles, Poznania and Pomorze), as well as the Poles of Silesia. The
Poles were treated contemptuously by the Germans as an inferior race.
Further, German settlers, according to decisions made in 1886 and 1908,
were sent to divide them from the Poles of Russia. Next door in Austria
the Poles were treated as a favoured minority. Thus the German-Polish
question by 1914 was explosive.
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY I9OO-I914
To the south and south-east of Germany there lay the dominions of the
Habsburgs ruled in 1900 by an old man of 70. Since 1867 the administra-
tion of Austria had been sharply divided from that of Hungary. Within
Austria the authorities had haltingly admitted the non-German, mainly
Slav, populations to certain rights, first and foremost that of being edu-
cated and tried in court in their own languages. In 1907 the Minister-
President of the day, Freiherr von Beck, put an end to a system for
electing the House of Representatives of the central Reichsrat by electoral
bodies called curiae which gave German voters great advantages. He
enfranchised virtually all men of 24 and over, and he grouped the consti-
tuencies so as to make them homogeneous nationally, not racially mixed.
For some time the Germans of Austria had failed to recognise that they
were a diminishing minority, but the new system made evident that Austria
was predominantly Slav. The most flourishing Slav group was that of the
Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, with its own university in Prague —
1 See below, p. 477.
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it demanded a second one in Brno (Briinn) in Moravia. The Moravian
Compromise of 1905 had arranged for the roughly proportional repre-
sentation of Germans and Czechs in the Moravian Diet. The inability of
the Czechs and Germans to come to similar terms with one another in
Bohemia was, however, already in 1900 ominous, since for many reasons
Bohemia was of great importance to the Monarchy. In all Austria (with-
out Hungary) there were at this time about 9 million Germans ; in Bohemia
and Moravia together some 6 million Czechs and 3 million Germans;
in Bohemia alone the Germans were rather more than a third of the
population.
Austria also embraced the Poles of Galicia (some 4I million), the
Ruthenes, Ukrainians and Russians of Eastern Galicia and the Bukovina
(over million), the Slovenes of Styria and Istria, the Croats of Dal-
matia: in addition there were less than a million Italians in the Trentino,
Trieste, Istria and a few in Dalmatia. The Chamber elected in 1907 was
something of a federal parliament of nationalities ; there were even two
Russian-nationalist deputies, one Zionist and one Jewish democrat. Only
the big Christian-Social and Social Democrat parties strove to rise above
the racial battle while remaining predominantly German. It is noteworthy
that for a long time Austrian members of parliament had been paid, 1 some-
thing unheard of in Germany or for that matter in Hungary.
Apart from the social and legal rights conceded to the different racial
groups in theory if not always in practice, Austria was governed rather as
Germany was: the Emperor Francis Joseph nominated his chief ministers,
who were responsible to him alone. The Reichsrat in Vienna 2 was free to
criticise as the Reichstag was in Berlin; the press was more or less free,
though somewhat restricted by the powerful influence of the Roman
Catholic church, which was closely linked with the dynasty. The admini-
stration was less efficient than that of Germany, but the force of racial
circumstances made it more tolerant. The general atmosphere, beyond the
world of the Court and the rather cosmopolitan aristocracy, was shabbier
and more servile.
On the other side of the river Leitha, where Francis Joseph was king of
Hungary, an entirely different system prevailed. Whatever people spoke
at home, were it German, Slovak or Rumanian, except in Croatia-
Slavonia they were compelled to be educated and tried in court as Magyars.
A certain number of elementary schools organised confessionally were
allowed to the non-Magyars, but they were in 1900 diminishing or losing
their independence. Just as people in Vienna were often heard to say that
German intransigence towards the Czechs in Bohemia would wreck the
1 Bismarck had been particularly hostile to the payment of members long after it had
been introduced in Austria.
8 In 1907 the Reichsrat was given the power to legislate, but in fact the Imperial govern-
ment legislated independently by special article as long as it survived.
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Habsburg Monarchy, so they would deplore the policy of the Magyars
for the same reason ; to be forced to speak German at least had a practical
advantage whereas to be forced to speak Magyar had none. The Archduke
Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, was known to resent the attitude
of the Hungarians : partly a Neapolitan Bourbon by descent and largely
so in outlook, it was what he regarded as Magyar insubordination towards
the dynasty that he condemned as well as the Magyar contribution towards
the disintegration of the Monarchy.
Like the Germans in Austria, the Magyars were a minority in Hungary,
but owing to their policy of Magyarisation this minority was slowly
increasing although the birth-rate of the non-Magyars was mostly higher.
Since the franchise was exercised by a small, very largely Magyar elec-
torate, and since the voting was public and police intimidation was used
to deter voters from supporting non-Magyar candidates, the Chamber in
Budapest was overwhelmingly Hungarian.
The chief non-Magyar subjects of the Crown of St Stephen were a
number of Germans and Jews chiefly in the few towns and particularly
in Budapest, and Slovaks, Ruthenes, Rumanians, Serbs and Croats. The
latter two groups, sharing their language but not their religion, were
legally guaranteed a fairly wide autonomy within the ancient Kingdom of
Croatia. After a brief rapprochement between 1904 and 1906 relations
between Budapest and Zagreb became strained: the Croats returned to
their tradition of looking to Vienna for support and now beyond Vienna
to Prague. The Slovaks, Ruthenes and Rumanians were mostly poor and
often illiterate peasants, often too poor to care about their racial identity.
The policy of the Magyar ruling class could not, however, prevent a
certain encouragement from the Czechs for a few Slovak leaders, whose
language was almost the same as Czech. Nor could it prevent generous
sums of money for educational purposes being sent from the Rumanians
of the Kingdom of Regat to the Rumanians of Transylvania.
Not only was Austria-Hungary increasingly anomalous in a Europe
of nation-states: its very dualism emphasised the rift between the Slavs,
who were divided between Austria and Hungary, and the German or
Magyar ruling class which owned the big estates and often controlled
industry. Thus the Slavs could nurse a grievance as the social underdogs,
so that class and racial antagonisms tended to merge. The tide of socialism
was rising. Thus the various Slav leaders, if and when they wished, could
identify the emancipation of the Slav nations with a future reign of social
justice. The dual system of Austria-Hungary was made even more explosive
by the contrast between the relatively liberal administration of Austria
and the conspicuous failure, between 1900 and 1914, to introduce any-
thing of the kind into Hungary. It was almost ironical that, after Beck’s
reform of the franchise, less than 100,000 Rumanian voters in Austria
were represented by 5 deputies in the Reichsrat. In the Hungarian
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Chamber nearly 3 million Rumanians in Transylvania and the Banat were
represented by 16 deputies — of whom one was Julius Maniu. (It is true
that there were 516 deputies in the Viennese Chamber and only 453 in that
of Budapest.) In Vienna the Rumanian deputies, in theory at least, could
address the Chamber in Rumanian ; in Budapest this was forbidden.
Of course things were not so simple as the racialist propagandists made
them seem. Within Austria the Polish and Czech Slavs were on bad terms
partly for social reasons. Many southern Slavs of the Monarchy before
1908 were sceptical about their brotherhood with the Serbs of Serbia.
Many peasants throughout Austria-Hungary, together with the shop-
keeper class as well as the nobility, regarded the rule of Francis Joseph
as an inevitable and acceptable tradition ; they were encouraged by their
priests to do so and to spurn suggestions to the contrary from the ‘traitor’
Socialists of the towns. In Hungary, naturally, the Socialist party was
small and weak, whereas in Austria in 19 11 81 Social Democrats were
elected and they dominated Vienna. It is interesting that many of the
leaders of the Austrian Socialists, including Viktor Adler himself, had
strongly nationalistic political roots. This was never true of German
Socialist leaders before 1933.
Economically Austria lagged behind Germany. Industry was highly
developed in Vienna, and in Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia
which reached into the region of the great Silesian coalfields: the iron
mines in Styria were important. But the proportion of the Austrian popula-
tion which still lived on the land between 1900 and 1914 was noticeably
higher than in Germany. Many of the peasants, German or not, had their
own little farms, but the Austrian aristocracy — families such as the
Schwarzenbergs — owned huge estates, particularly in Bohemia and
Moravia. Hungary was far more backward in every way. Budapest was
the only large town and industrial centre. The Hungarian magnates — the
biggest landowners were the Esterhazys — and the squires owned the land,
many of the peasants living miserably as landless labourers, like serfs but
detached from the land. The Hungarians were frequently in revolt against
their union with Austria. Sometimes they complained of the use of Ger-
man words of command in the Imperial and Royal Army. 1 But their
favourite quarrel was with the customs union which in fact dated back to
1850; they complained that it prevented the development of Hungarian
industry. Thanks to Jewish capital and drive, however, industry did
develop in the years before 1914 so that the percentage of urban popula-
tion rose to about 25. From 1900 to 1914 the population of Austria
and Hungary together rose from some 45 to some 50 millions; looking
back, the Dual Monarchy has been lauded precisely for supplying a
customs-free zone in the Danube valley for this considerable population.
No sooner had the first elections after Beck’s reform in Austria been
1 Kaiserliche und Konigliche, popularly abbreviated to k-und-k.
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held than the Young Turk revolution in July 1908 reverberated through
eastern Europe. Bosnia with Herzegovina had been administered by
Habsburg officials since 1878 : now in October 1908 the Austro-Hungarian
Foreign Office and General Staff decided to annex Bosnia outright. It was
a poor enough area but the majority of its inhabitants were Serbs or
Croats, and the annexation was regarded by the Slavs as a German-
Magyar affront to Serbia and the southern Slavs. It was really after this
that Prague became south Slav headquarters with much talk of some kind
of south Slav state in the future: thus the Germans of Bohemia had a new
grievance against the Czechs. The loyalty of Slav political leaders to the
Habsburg dynasty was shaken : Russophil tendencies among the Czechs
were strengthened. Even the diplomatists of Imperial Germany had spoken
for years of Austria-Hungary’s inevitable disintegration and some Austrian
Germans wished to be annexed by Germany. The annexation of Bosnia,
followed by Russia’s apparent acquiescence, made the more aggressive
Germans believe that Austria might expand instead of breaking up. This
was the choice. The idea of expansion merged into the idea of a German-
dominated Mitteleuropa which was advocated by so enlightened a man
as the German pastor and publicist Friedrich Naumann, as the best
economic background for social progress.
THE BALKAN PENINSULA
The nationalistic ideals of the nineteenth century were still unsatisfied at
the beginning of the twentieth, not only in Austria-Hungary and in
German and Russian Poland but also throughout the Balkan peninsula;
indeed they could only be satisfied there at the expense both of the Dual
Monarchy and the Turkish Empire. The latter, ruled by the notorious
Abdul Hamid, although in retreat for many years, still dominated the
Balkans as it did North Africa; in theory the Turks still ruled Bosnia and
Bulgaria. The Greeks were desperately dissatisfied on account of turbulent
Crete and because Macedonia was still under Turkey. Macedonia was
the Gordian knot of the peninsula; it was inhabited by a confusion of
races each claiming the mastery. In the south there were Greeks, in the
west Serbs and Albanians, in the north some Rumanians, and there were
Turks scattered here and there. The biggest single group of Macedonians
was considered by Bulgarians to be Bulgarian, and, ever since the abortive
Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, Bulgaria had considered Macedonia to
belong to her by right. The most famous Macedonian nationalist body,
the terroristic ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation’
(I.M.R.O.), had been founded in 1893 to fight the Turks. In 1903 at
Mtirzsteg Austria-Hungary and Russia agreed to a programme for the
administrative reform of Macedonia, and the other great powers sup-
ported them with the Turks.
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The Balkan peninsula owed to the Turkish regime its squalid back-
wardness and lack of communications. Apart from the oil in Rumania it
contained important metals, but any economic advance in the early years
of the century was due to Austrian or German investors and technicians ;
the Germans were active in the Rumanian oilfields — indeed this was part
of the German Drang nach Osten. In so far as the Serbs, Bulgars and
Greeks had survived the Turkish conquest they had emerged as free
peasants; only Rumania had an aristocracy of big landowners, against
whom in 1907 their peasants revolted but were suppressed.
Through their kinship with the Serbs, Croats and — more remotely —
Slovenes of Austria-Hungary, the Serbs of Serbia had become the chief
south Slav centre of attraction. In 1903, after the gruesome murder of the
former king and queen, the Karageorgevic dynasty was restored in Belgrade
in order to show greater national independence.
In July 1908, however, it was not the Balkan Slavs but the Turks them-
selves who carried through a revolution. A group of officers calling them-
selves Young Turks was able to force the sultan to acknowledge his
forgotten constitutional obligations. At the same time the Young Turks
became infected with the nationalism of the Slavs in the place of then-
former indifference; the Turks were no longer prepared to watch the
corrosion of their power by hostile nationalism, but began to think in
terms of an aggressive Turkish nation. In the circumstances the czar of
Bulgaria quickly declared his independence and Crete declared its union
with Greece in October: 1 it has been seen that the Austro-Hungarian
authorities at the same time decided openly to annex Bosnia and Herzego-
vina, while the powers abandoned Macedonia to the Turks. The Russian
government, which, however much it disliked Balkan revolutionaries,
could ill afford to lose prestige among the Pan-Slav intellectuals, was
obliged to accept the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia. But the word went
round among all Slav sympathisers that it was a matter of reculer pour
mieux sauter. At all events the emotional clash between those who felt
hotly pro-German or pro-Magyar or pro-Turk, and the others who felt
hotly pro-Slav, was violent; its effects merged into the two Balkan Wars
and the first world war shortly afterwards.
The anomalies, the Balkan states which did not fit neatly into the
German-Slav conflict, were Rumania and Greece, both proud not to be
Slav. Although Rumanian feeling against Magyar oppression of the
Rumanians in Transylvania was intense, there was also strong feeling
against the Slavs of Russia and against the Bulgars over disputed frontier
questions. This made possible Rumania’s ties with the Triple Alliance
favoured by her Hohenzollem dynasty. Not only did the Greeks clash with
both Serbs and Bulgars in Macedonia but the Serbs and Bulgars, so
closely related in every way, constantly quarrelled between themselves.
1 This was only recognised by treaty in 1913.
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The Albanians added the piquancy of being distinct from all the rest in
race and language; they were a smaller racial group than any of the
others, numbering only about a million.
After the Italian defeat of the Turks in Libya in 1911, Serbia with
Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece attacked Turkey; it was in fact Monte-
negro, a detached Serbian outpost, which first declared war in October
1912. The Turks were all but driven out of Europe. A quarrel between the
victors caused Serbs and Greeks, now supported by the Rumanians, to
attack the Bulgars in 1913. In this second Balkan War the Turks were able
to creep back to the line of the Maritza river, but that was all. Crete was
permanently attached to Greece. Thus the Balkan countries had freed the
peninsula but no one was satisfied. The Bulgars refused to accept Serbia’s
conquest of most of Macedonia; on the other hand Austria-Hungary had
insisted upon the creation of an Albanian national state in 1913 in order
to prevent Serbia from reaching the western Balkan coast. A German-
Slav explosion had not been fended off : it had been brought nearer, for
an extended Serbia more than ever resented a Habsburg Bosnia reinforced
by a Habsburg-protected Albania.
Italy 1900-1914
After disastrous defeat in Abyssinia in 1896 and a dangerous collision
between the government and the governed, especially in Milan, in 1898,
with the turn of the century Italy entered into a period of conciliation and
prosperity. When in 1900 King Umberto was murdered by an anarchist
in revenge for the civilian casualties of 1898, his successor, Victor
Emmanuel III. seemed able to turn over a new leaf. In February 1901 the
enlightened radical, Zanardelli, was appointed Prime Minister: his right
hand was Giovanni Giolitti as Minister of the Interior. These two men
were the first Italians in authority to show understanding for Italy’s new
social problems. The king of Italy had a less thorough control of govern-
ment than the emperors of Germany and Austria, and men like Zanardelli
and Giolitti played up the powers of parliament — they were deputies and
depended upon a parliamentary majority.
In the preceding decade, in spite of the lack of coal and iron, the
industrialisation of northern Italy on a modem scale had begun. Milan
had become a great industrial centre as well as Italy’s financial and com-
mercial capital. In 1899 the FIAT car factory was founded at Turin,
whose life was transformed by this. The port of Genoa had been developed
by the Ansaldo concern. Population increased quickly in evil conditions.
Industrial profit was monopolised by the rich, who were absurdly favoured
by the fiscal system. Although the franchise had been slightly extended
since the foundation of the kingdom, only the better-off classes elected the
deputies to the Chamber. The new industrial working class — still in 1900
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smaller even in the north than that of those who worked on the land 1 —
had no political or social rights. It was, however, championed by a group
of intellectuals who had founded a Marxist Socialist Party ( Partito
Socialist a Italiano ) in 1892, before the social question had had time to
ripen.
Zanardelli and Giolitti were no Socialists but they felt the injustices of
the Italian social system and they deplored the rigid conservatism of the
possessing classes. Giolitti, who succeeded Zanardelli as Prime Minister
in 1903 and ruled Italy with few interruptions until she entered the war,
was above all a benevolent opportunist. He thought it expedient to
integrate the new working class into the constitutional state by improving
social conditions and extending the franchise. The dominant Socialist
leaders of the early years of the century in Italy, men like Filippo Turati,
Ivanoe Bonomi and Leonida Bissolati, favoured moderate social reforms
which should put the working class in a better position to make further
gains. Hence to a considerable extent they were willing to play Giolitti’s
game. Pragmatically the Italian state thus became not only constitutional
but also liberal : in spite of an elected mayor and corporation in each city
it was, however, over-centralised through the rule of the prefects appointed
by the Minister of the Interior.
A major problem in Italy in 1900 was the relation between the state and
the Roman Catholic church, since the overwhelming majority of Italy’s
citizens were Catholics. The Vatican had been treated not ungenerously
by the new Italy; the popes, however, refused to recognise the kingdom,
which indeed they damned. In theory confessing Catholics were forbidden
to participate in the life of the lay state, though it was obvious that those
who were qualified to vote mostly did so. In the early years of the century,
many Catholics indeed criticised the policy of the Vatican. Those who
reacted to social change thought that the church should compete with the
Socialists for working-class support, saving the workers from the evils of
Socialist atheism. A particular group called Modernist considered that
Catholic dogma should not be static but adapt itself to social development.
Soon after his election in 1903 Pope Pius X condemned the Modernists;
he had, however, decided radically to modify the papal veto on voting in
elections. Henceforward the bishops in each diocese were to decide whether
or not their flocks should vote, and the decisions were more and more in
favour of doing so.
In 19 1 1 Giolitti brought about an electoral reform which increased the
electorate from 3 to 8 million. In the general election which followed in
1913 the Catholic vote was obviously of the greatest importance. Giolitti,
by nature an anti-clerical, therefore came to terms with the head of the
Catholic Electoral Union, Gentiloni: in accordance with a pact named
after the latter, many of Giolitti’s followers courted the Catholic vote by
1 Actually about 35 per cent of the whole population.
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promising to oppose divorce and support Catholic schools. Although
there was as yet no prospect of a reconciliation between Vatican and
Quirinal, Giolitti hoped to ‘integrate’ the Catholics too into the consti-
tutional state.
The Age of Giolitti, as this pre-war period was called in Italy, saw the
development of violent opposition to Giolitti’s common-sense com-
promises, the more so since in southern Italy his bargains led to scandalous
corruption. The extreme poverty of the south, which moved backwards
rather than forwards while the north was becoming prosperous, was
emphasised by the appalling earthquake at Messina in 1908. The historian,
Salvemini, began to lead a campaign against Giolitti as a corrupter: he
also began to preach help for the south from which he came. 1 From the
Socialist side, the extremists led by Lazzari and Mussolini defeated the
moderate leadership at the party congress at Reggio Emilia in 1912: very
shortly afterwards Mussolini became editor of Avanti, the chief Socialist
newspaper, and used it to attack Giolitti’s opportunism. At the other end
of things there arose a new Nationalist party which expressed the wide-
spread feeling of boredom with Giolitti, and which demanded an aggres-
sive foreign policy: the war against Turkey, which brought both Libya
and the Dodecanese Islands to Italy, was to be only a beginning. The new
nationalism was linked, through the poet D’Annunzio and the futurist
Marinetti, with the literary and artistic movements of the day. It was in
1909 that Marinetti launched his first Futurist Manifesto in a Parisian
newspaper; his avant-garde was surprisingly influential in Italy for the
time being, certainly so long as it remained chauvinistic and bellicose.
When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914 Italy, though
aligned for years with the central powers, had long come to terms in
secret with France: this had made the Libyan war possible. In 1914
Giolitti and the moderate Socialists, keeping strange company with the
General Staff and the Vatican, were against participation; the last two
centres of influence were really pro-German. The Nationalists, in equally
strange company with pro-French Radicals like Salvemini, wished to
come in on the Allies’ side. In the autumn of 1914 Mussolini launched an
interventionist Socialist newspaper. In May 1915, after the territorial
bribes offered by the Allies in the secret Treaty of London, 2 Italy declared
war against Austria-Hungary.
1 His wife and children were all killed in the earthquake of Messina
2 This treaty was signed on 26 April 191 5 ; the Entente powers promised Italy the Trentino,
Trieste with Istria, Dalmatia excluding Fiume, Spalato (Split) and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) but
including the Adriatic islands and virtual possession of Albania.
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THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
The most vocal opinion in Austria-Hungary, and more particularly in
Germany, believed in the early years of the war that German domination
over the Danube valley, all Poland (with some regional autonomy perhaps),
the Baltic provinces and probably the fertile Ukraine would complete the
creation of a Great-German world power. The Russian revolutions in
1917 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 only confirmed these
beliefs although the price paid for the war by the civilian populations in
food shortages was already exorbitant and the disintegration of Austria-
Hungary was proceeding. From 1916 onwards the kaiser had practically
abdicated in favour of the military leaders, Hindenburg and LudendorfF,
who represented the chauvinism of the old ruling class. The parties in the
Reichstag, however, who were opposed to this, gathered hidden strength.
Centre, Socialists and Progressives pressed for franchise reform in Prussia
if public morale were to hold, and at the same time worked for peace
without annexations; in July 1917 a deputy of the Centre party called
Erzberger brought forward a Peace Resolution in these terms which was
passed. The Russian military collapse encouraged the arrogance of the
German ruling class, while the Russian revolutions added to the anxieties
of the Austrian government since they profoundly disturbed all the Slav
populations. They followed, moreover, quickly upon the death of the old
emperor in November 1916, who had left the young and inexperienced
Charles to struggle with his heritage, with no august side-whiskers to
help him.
In Italy, the defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 shocked the people
into more serious efforts and national morale recovered. With Austria-
Hungary’s disintegration Italy stepped into a victor’s role: the old Irre-
dentist goals of Trieste and the Trentino were achieved, the south Tyrol
up to the Brenner Pass being added to the Trentino, and Istria, Zara and
several Adriatic islands to Trieste, though not, at first, Fiume. Thus Italy
acquired a German-speaking ‘minority’ of about a quarter of a million
and a Slovene and Croat one of about half a million. The social problems
with which she was now overwhelmed were not diminished by these alien
populations.
Most Italian peasants, particularly those from the south, had never
until the war guessed at the living standards of their own northern com-
patriots; like the Russian and Magyar peasants they came home with
new ideas. The Socialist leaders were excited, too, above all by the Russian
revolutions. Opposed to them were the Nationalists and D’Annunzio’s
followers, who were full of indignation that Italy was not to gain still
more territory. At the first post-war elections in November 1919, however,
unlike the ‘ Khaki ’ elections in France and Britain, the Socialists and the
Catholic Popolari polled best. In spite of acute economic difficulties the
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country seemed to settle down under a new Giolitti government in 1920:
this government expelled D’Annunzio from Fiume, which he had seized in
September 1919. During 1921, nevertheless, the position of the Socialists
became much weaker. Their left wing split off to form the new Italian
Communist party, while the constant strikes in industry irritated non-
Socialist opinion and blew wind into the sails of the Nationalists and
others on the right. Mussolini, the left-wing interventionist of 1915, had
founded in March 1919 something which he called the Fascist Movement.
Gradually Mussolini saw that an alliance with the Nationalists would
give him greater power, and he increasingly accepted support from pre-
datory bands of ex-servicemen who were hotly anti-Marxist and glad to
take money from some of the industrialists in return for intimidating or
beating up Socialists. During 1922 the situation in Italy deteriorated
rapidly and the king and his advisers were at such a loss that they invited
Mussolini, whose black-shirted supporters were threatening Rome, to
become Prime Minister in October. Mussolini formed a coalition govern-
ment in which all the major parties, including the Socialists, were repre-
sented. It was not until January 1925 that he followed Lenin’s example
and established a one-party state with only Fascist ministers. There seems
no reason to suppose that in October 1922 he had any idea that this would
be the consequence: nevertheless October 1922 became a landmark, parti-
cularly for all the enemies of liberal government. In 1924 it was still possible
for Matteotti to indict Mussolini’s terrorist election techniques: indeed
Matteotti came within an ace of success, for his murder in June nearly
overthrew Mussolini. Having failed to do so, its consequences impelled
Mussolini to set up his whole-hog Fascist regime.
Fascism in Italy put an end to all freedoms. It infused a chauvinistic
and pseudo-warlike tone into education and the arts. It increased the
over-centralisation of Italian administration. Its economic results were
not remarkable; it emphasised the protective character of Italian economic
policy but failed to make Italy self-supporting, for instance in wheat. It
was not anti-Semitic until later, it came to terms with the Catholic church
in the Lateran Agreements of 1929, it preserved the Monarchy and the
Senate set up by the Statuto of 1848. It even allowed Benedetto Croce to
continue to publish his review La Critica with little interference.
After the German offensive in the spring of 1 9 1 8 had failed and American
participation on the other side was making itself felt, late in the summer
the German military leaders ordered the civilians to make peace. Men like
Erzberger and the Socialists, Ebert and Scheidemann, were left with the
job of placating the Allies and their own outraged public opinion. Luden-
dorff disappeared in disguise to Sweden while the emperor took refuge in
Holland and the other German dynasties dispersed. Despised trade-
unionists and Catholics were left in charge while the defeated armies
returned to their starving homes, and revolutionary talk ebbed and
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flowed. Marx had destined advanced industrial Germany to be the cradle
of Communist revolution. After the German military had helped him
back to Russia Lenin always thought in terms of a Communist Germany
as imminent. Yet, although German society was profoundly shaken,
although all the old beliefs seemed to have collapsed, no fundamental
social change took place. There was no expropriation of the landowners
or industrialists, only an attempt to realise, in so far as defeat allowed,
the political dreams of 1848 : the result was the Weimar constitution. Like
most new constitutions of the day it provided for male and female universal
suffrage from the age of 20 — in Prussia too — and for proportional repre-
sentation, thus making new demands upon an inexperienced electorate.
The President was to be elected by the people, but governments were
to be made and unmade by the Reichstag, which was elected by the
same people. For the first time there was to be a Minister of the Interior
for the Reich — that ambiguous word remained — although the Prussian
Minister of the Interior who controlled the Prussian police was more
powerful.
The Treaty of Versailles, or at any rate its economic aspect, was harsh.
The German nationalists, the old ruling classes and their supporters
among the shopkeepers and peasants, used the so-called V ersailler Diktat
to discredit the liberalism of the Weimar Republic; they succeeded in
accusing the civilians, who had borne the brunt of the defeat when Hinden-
burg and Ludendorff shirked responsibility, of ‘stabbing the German
Army in the back’. This monstrous lie preserved the gulf that stretched
between the arrogance of Germany’s former rulers with their supporters
and the timid integrity of those who wished for political and social justice
in twentieth-century terms. A certain levelling up did take place in German
society between 1922 and 1924 thanks to the collapse of the currency and
the disappearance of the nation’s money savings. The inflation was partly
due to Germany’s inevitable plight after the years of war and partly to the
Allies’ reparation demands, but it was fostered by some of the more
powerful industrialists: their property, like landed property, was all the
more valuable (see above, p. 232).
The fiercest anti-Slav (and anti-Semitic) racialism had long been voiced
by the Germans of the mixed Austrian crownlands like Bohemia and
Styria. During the war these Germans had hailed the alliance with Berlin
as the prelude to the real union of all Germans in the German-speaking
lands and also in territory further east where the Germans formed at most
an important urban element. When the central powers collapsed and the
Allies forbade the union of Austria with Germany (precisely on account
of all the Mitteleuropa talk), it was the Germans of Bohemia, of south
Tyrol, of Novi Sad, of Transylvania, who felt most outraged. Instead of
being regarded as the advanced element in the Habsburg empire they
found themselves degraded to being ‘minorities’ in Italy or Rumania or
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the new Slav states of the Czechs and Slovaks or the Serbs and Croats.
The German ‘ barons ’ of Russia’s former Baltic provinces, the German
landowners of Germany’s former Polish territories, felt themselves to be
humiliated in the same way. Many of them took refuge in the Weimar
Republic, but they swelled the ranks of its disloyal citizens. They disliked
its tolerance, racial and otherwise; above all they disliked its capital city.
For Berlin quickly became headquarters of the new modem arts. Since
the beginning of the century Berlin had had its sophisticated side, parti-
cularly its clever, sceptical Jewish journalists. Now this element became
more conspicuous and exerted more influence.
The Russian revolution had caused the Spartakists, as a left-wing group
called themselves, to break away as Communists from the traditional
Social Democratic party of Germany. In January 1919 the Communist
leaders, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by Rightists in
an affray in Berlin. These two turned out to be irreplaceable; insurgent
attempts made by the German Communists in 1921 and then (in Hamburg
and Saxony) in October 1923 were suppressed, the latter with the help of
the Reichswehr. After an early and short-lived Communist regime in
Bavaria (spring 1919), followed by a Bavarian threat to separate from
Berlin and then an abortive revolt engineered by a group of fanatical
nationalists led by an Austrian Jew-hater called Hitler supported by
Ludendorff in November 1923, the Allies came to terms with the rulers of
Germany over reparations. In the summer of 1924, after a new German
currency had been introduced, the Dawes Plan was launched and five
years of European recovery were initiated, five years to be associated with
the name of Gustav Stresemann. Stresemann had been appointed Chan-
cellor by Ebert in August 1923 ; in November his government was defeated,
thanks to a hostile Socialist vote, but he remained as Foreign Minister
until his death in October 1929.
Industrial development was now resumed in Germany with great suc-
cess, particularly in light industry, and much building was undertaken:
the necessary capital was largely provided by short-term loans from
America. In the spring of 1925 Field-Marshal von Hindenburg was elected
President of the German Republic in succession to Ebert, who had died.
Stresemann, with his back covered by the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 with
Russia, was already approaching Paris in the hopes of a detente and was
disconcerted by this demonstration in favour of the old ruling class which
was suspect abroad. With Briand’s collaboration he was nevertheless able
to arrive at the signature of the Treaties of Locarno in October (see above,
ch. vm). These led on to the election of Germany to a permanent seat on
the Council of the League of Nations in September 1926: there was no
more reason for the Germans to feel outcast. Although a remarkable
level of prosperity was reached there was a disagreeable tension between
advanced Berlin, the centre of Prussian administration which was con-
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trolled for most of this period by a Social Democrat Prime Minister, Otto
Braun, and the provincial world whether of landowners, shopkeepers or
peasants who feared Berlin as revolutionary.
The position of the Viennese was not unlike that of the Berliners in
these years. Only Vienna was harder hit by post-war circumstances for it
was a huge city at one end of the fragment of the Habsburg Monarchy —
the Alpenlander — which had become the first Austrian Republic. Although
Vienna remained the great banking centre for central Europe and the
Balkans, Austria was hit by the tariff barriers which sprang up around her.
For now it was not only the Magyars but also the Czechs and Poles who
wished to protect their own industries. The Austrian Republic was a
federal one and Socialist Vienna was one of its nine Lander. Industry was
concentrated in Vienna and so was poverty; the Socialist mayor and
corporation, as soon as they could, built great blocks of workers’ flats
and naturally obliged the other householders of Vienna to help pay for
them. This contributed to the anti-Socialist indignation of the clerical
Christian Social party which was strong among shopkeepers and peasants
throughout the eight other Lander. In the Austrian towns and at the
Austrian universities there was above all German national, even racial,
indignation over the fact that the Allies had vetoed the union of German
Austria with Germany, and over the degradation, as it was felt to be, of
other Germans in central and eastern Europe to be mere minorities in the
successor states.
There were now three million Germans, who had indeed offered re-
sistance to it, in the new Czechoslovak Republic based upon Prague, a city
whose role, it has been seen, had been growing in the years before 1914.
Czechoslovakia was in large part the child of an elderly Slovak professor
of philosophy at Prague University called Thomas Masaryk, a man of
splendid integrity and enlightenment. Six million Czechs supported it
warmly, two million Slovaks formerly ruled by the Hungarians were glad
now to be free to use their own language, and half a million Ruthenes and
others in neglected Ruthenia were not sorry to escape from Magyar rule.
Bitter rivalry between the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia was an old
story and competition between them had probably stimulated economic
development to its relatively high level. The Czechoslovak government
subscribed to the Minorities Treaty drawn up by the League of Nations,
and the Bohemian and Moravian Germans had their own schools
and university. But the Czechs were the top dogs now, and small
Czech officials in particular were certain to remind the Germans of this
constantly.
Czechoslovakia adopted an advanced democratic constitution and
initiated legislation for the redistribution of the land: most of her Ger-
mans felt that this constitution was worse than Beck’s franchise reform
of 1907, and the land reform seemed to them to be aimed only against the
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huge German-owned estates. The prosperity of the second half of the
’twenties, however, soothed the various susceptibilities.
After the war the Yugoslav Triune Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes was set up under the Serb Karageorgevic dynasty. After the
Austrian and Magyar landlords had left, like Bulgaria it had no aristo-
cracy; it was a poor undeveloped peasant country, including Bosnia, most
of the old Hungarian Banat and Macedonia as won by Serbia in the
Balkan wars. Bulgaria, after all, had been on the losing side again between
1914 and 1918. Yugoslavia was particularly jealous of Italy, the more so
after Mussolini was able finally to annex Flume in January 1924.
Thus the Slovaks and the south Slavs had been liberated from the
Magyars. More difficult and more important, Transylvania with its
Rumanian majority had been handed over to Rumania: Maniu became
leader of the Rumanian National Peasant party and was instrumental in
putting through land reform here as well. It has been seen that Hungary
before 1914 was highly explosive. Now all the non-Magyars except half
a million Germans had been lost ; in addition 1 i million Magyars had been
lost to Rumania and nearly f million to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia
respectively. After a brief Communist episode in 1919, when a Soviet re-
public was set up under Bela Kun, the magnates and squires of Hungary
recaptured power. They did little to improve their society however : a tre-
mendous campaign in favour of undoing the peace treaties of 1919 and
1920 deflected public attention from their 3 million landless peasants, prob-
ably the worst off in all Europe.
In some ways the most interesting of the post-war states was the new
Poland: it began perhaps with the most severe handicaps. It had been a
major battlefield; it started from zero with no natural frontiers and no
port; it contained no highly developed industry except in the part of
Upper Silesia which it obtained as a result of the plebiscite of March 1921.
After the Russian troops were driven from Warsaw in August 1920, Soviet
Russia was induced in March 1921 to accept a frontier which gave all her
‘western lands’ to Poland: thus about six million White Russians and
Ukrainians who belonged to the Greek Orthodox or the Uniate church
became the subjects of the Catholic Poles. Far more was to be heard of
Poland’s frontiers with Germany, although they could be much more
easily justified. A good many Germans lived in the towns in Pomorze —
which the Germans chose to call ‘the Corridor’ — and in Poznania or
Posen. But there were only about 700,000 Germans in a Poland of over
30 millions, relatively a much smaller minority than the Germans in
Hungary or Yugoslavia, not to speak of Czechoslovakia. The problem of a
port for Poland was solved by making the German city of Danzig into an
independent Free City within the Polish customs area and represented
abroad by Poland. The Germans would hear nothing in defence of these
frontiers; not even the Social Democrats accepted them, and to middle-of-
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the-road opportunists, such as Stresemann became, they were something
to be abolished at the earliest possible moment. Thus Poland was faced
by bitter animosities and great poverty from the start.
The Baltic provinces, which the Germans had intended to conquer,
emerged from the war as the three small independent states of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania ; they expropriated their German barons, who mostly
added to the Auslandsdeutsche in the Weimar Republic. Poland hoped to
take the Baltic States under her wing but this plan broke down chiefly
because Poland in 1920 seized the mixed town of Vilna from the Lithua-
nians, who regarded it as their capital. After this the Lithuanians could not
be prevented by the great powers from taking the formerly German port
of Memel, to which, however, a statute guaranteed by these powers
offered autonomy.
Meanwhile a Turkish resurgence under an officer called Kemal Pasha
caused the defeat and discomfiture of the Greeks in Asia Minor. At the
conference at Lausanne in 1 923 the Greeks were obliged again to recognise
the river Maritza as Turkey’s western frontier and to agree to evacuate
about a million Greeks from Anatolia: some half million Turks were
evacuated from Greece. Thus Greece, naturally very poor, had little time
to put her house in order before the Great Depression.
Signs of political trouble appeared in eastern Europe in three countries
before the Great Depression. In 1926 Pilsudski, the Polish general who
had done most to liberate the Poles during the war, carried through a
military coup d'etat, oddly enough in conjunction with the Polish Socialists ;
it was aimed chiefly against the Peasant party, which was an Austrian
inheritance. Pilsudski declared that parliamentary government had broken
down, and imprisoned and later exiled the Peasant leader, Witos, who had
sat in the Reichsrat in Vienna. Thereafter Pilsudski exercised authority
through the army, allowing the Sejm or parliament to continue with
diminished powers. In Austria after some Rightists involved in a skirmish
in January 1927 had been acquitted, Socialist crowds burnt down the
Viennese Palace of Justice in July. This exacerbated feelings between the
Right and the Left in Austria, drawing the Clericals and Pan-Germans
together against the Socialists. In 1928 parliamentary government began
to break down in Yugoslavia because the Catholic Croats resented the
rule of the Serb King Alexander and what they regarded as the primitive
influence of the Serb Orthodox hierarchy and the Serb army and bureau-
crats: the Croats claimed autonomy. The Croat leader, Radic, was shot at
and mortally wounded in the SkupStina or parliament by a Serb who went
unpunished. In January 1929 the king proclaimed his own dictatorship
and in September 1931 introduced a farcical constitution with open
instead of secret voting. Thus the Great Depression hit the peasants of
Yugoslavia when many of them already felt great bitterness against their
government.
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Until the autumn of 1929, however, political and social life had on the
whole been consolidated: the peasant countries could sell food to the
industrial ones : their own over-population, which was intensified by their
poor standards of production, was still bearable. With the death of
Stresemann (October 1929), which contributed to the strange collapse of
confidence in the United States, capital was withdrawn from Germany,
employment shrank and Germany reduced her imports of food. The
vicious circle had begun.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
HITLER BECOMES GERMAN CHANCELLOR
In Germany towards the end of 1929 employment melted away so rapidly
that the prosperous period seemed to have been a mere illusion. In Austria
the prosperity had been less convincing in any case, and soon the streets of
Vienna seemed crowded with beggars. The Socialist Chancellor of Ger-
many, Hermann Muller, resigned, and Hindenburg called upon the leader
of the Centre party, Heinrich Bruning, to succeed him in the spring of
1930. Behind Bruning, and far more than he ever realised, intrigues were
concentrating upon plans to make Hindenburg more of a pre-1914
emperor, and to reduce the powers of the Reichstag accordingly: these
intrigues emanated from a ‘political general’ called Kurt von Schleicher,
a friend of the President’s son Oscar. When in July 1930 Bruning failed
to get the agreement of the Reichstag to some deflationary measures of his,
Hindenburg, encouraged by Schleicher, enforced them by emergency
decree. Bruning thought it correct to dissolve the Reichstag, which had
been elected in May 1928 in the prosperous period.
Elections were held on 14 September 1930: the results were like a bomb-
shell for Germany and for Europe. The number of Communist deputies
increased from 54 to 77 and the National Socialist Party (Nazis) shot up
from 12 in the last Reichstag to 107 : they were now the largest party after
the Social Democrats. These Nazis were the followers of the Austrian
agitator, Adolf Hitler, who had ignominiously failed to seize power in
Munich in November 1923. Upon release from prison, where he had
begun to write Mein Kampf at Christmas 1924 he had set to work to
reorganise his followers, placing great emphasis upon his Storm Troopers
or S.A. Large numbers of young men who could not fit into Weimar
Germany were at hand even in the days of high employment. They were
provided with a curious military type of uniform with jackboots and were
declared necessary to protect Nazi meetings from Communist interruption.
Basically they were intended to intimidate. With the slump their recruits
multiplied rapidly since many ordinary young men could now find no
work; feeling indignant and solitary they were happy to be clothed and
employed and provided with formulated grievances against the authorities
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and slogans suggesting social salvation. It was particularly in the pro-
vinces that the S.A. flourished, not in Berlin: the Prussian authorities
seemed more aware of the danger from them and placed obstacles in their
path. The elections of September 1930 gave the Nazis their first big
opportunity, which they did not waste.
With the new Reichstag Bruning became far more dependent upon
presidential support and was indeed reduced to ruling by emergency
decree. He tried to gain prestige by success abroad: in June 1930 the
Rhineland had been evacuated by Allied troops. But with the Great
Depression reparations payments under the new Young Plan were more
resented than ever and so were the troubles of ‘poor little Austria’. In the
spring of 1931 Germany and Austria put forward a plan for an Austro-
German customs union. Far from alleviating the crisis, this precipitated
an intensification of it. The French resented what seemed to them a
revival of Mitteleuropa and the plan was dropped. French pressure in
Vienna was thought to have contributed to the collapse of the Creditanstalt
there in May 1931 : this caused repercussions throughout central Europe.
It led straight to the suspension of private discount payments by the
German Reichsbank on 20 June and contributed to the collapse of the
Darmstadter bank in Germany on 13 July. The Hoover moratorium on
20 June had provided some respite (see above, ch. vin). The next thing was
the collapse of sterling with world-wide repercussions. Hitler’s propaganda
exploited the whole situation to the uttermost. Bruning, who misunder-
stood Hindenburg’s backing, decided to work for his re-election as Presi-
dent and enrolled his own Centre party and the Socialists in support.
Hitler, hastily acquiring German citizenship for the first time, decided to
ran against him: thereby he gained new outlets for his vast publicity
although Hindenburg was re-elected in April 1932.
What was this National Socialism with which Hitler was trying to
impregnate Germany? It was a crude claim that the Germans belonged
to a superior race in whose interest other races were to sacrifice whatever
profited — in Hitler’s view — the Germans. The others might be called upon
to abandon their territory, their education, their identity, even to be
annihilated. Among the Germans themselves those who accepted National
Socialism were encouraged to destroy the others without regard for any
moral scruple. Hitler’s creed was, however, presented with such skill as
to exploit the whole malaise of German society. It claimed to be able to
undo post-Versailles humiliations ; it claimed to be about to abolish the
rigid class distinctions which had largely survived into the Republic; it
claimed to be able to find work and a fitting reward for every good German.
It exploited to the full the antipathy felt by provincials towards the Jews
who had made Berlin into the slightly hectic yet brilliant centre of modem
art which it had become. Hitler did not then say what fate he intended for
the Jews, but he sometimes spoke of the physical extermination of one's
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enemies. People discounted such talk as unrealistic ; indeed many Germans
approved rather of Italian Fascism with its compromises than of Hitler’s
real aims. After the clearest evidence of their destructive intentions
Briining decided in April 1932 that Hitler’s Storm Troopers must be
suppressed throughout the Reich. On being re-elected Hindenburg was
asked to agree to this. But he had met Hitler by now and preferred Hitler’s
men to the Socialist Reichsbanner organisation which existed to defend
the Republic. The upshot was that he dismissed Briining, appointing
Franz von Papen in his place with a team of ministers which, like those
before 1914, did not depend upon Reichstag support but only upon the
confidence of the head of the state. In July Papen suppressed Otto Braun’s
regime in Prussia(which had lost much support in elections in April) and held
fresh national elections. Unemployment was still chronic and the National
Socialists more than doubled the votes they had gained in September 1930.
In August Hitler demanded to be Chancellor with full powers but Hinden-
burg refused this: thereupon Hitler insolently expressed his ‘solidarity’
with some S.A. men condemned to death for a political murder at
Potempa. In the autumn unemployment did not rise as quickly as in the
last three autumns and in elections in November the Nazis lost two
million votes. In January 1933, making use of quarrels between Papen
and Schleicher, who had been Papen’s Minister of Defence, then his suc-
cessor, Hitler agreed to be Chancellor with Papen as Vice-Chancellor and
only two Nazi colleagues— Hitler could not wait for the economic recovery
to become more obvious.
Hitler had taken office on condition that a fresh general election should
be held on 5 March 1933 under the administrative control of the Nazis —
he had brought into power with him Goring as Minister of the Interior in
Prussia with a seat in the Reich cabinet and Frick as Reich Minister of
the Interior. Hitler and Goring boasted that this would be the last election
for a thousand years because the Nazis would know what to do with their
majority. Between 30 January and 5 March a tremendous campaign of
intimidation was organised. Already well-known opponents of Hitler
began to vanish into prisons, where they were beaten up. The Reichstag
Fire on 27 February gave the Nazis a wonderful opportunity within less
than a week of the election; claiming that the fire was the signal for a
Communist coup d'etat, they declared a state of emergency, increased the
arrests and muzzled the press. Interestingly enough Hitler did not win an
absolute majority; the Centre and the Socialists were not shaken and he
needed the support of the Nationalists, who supplied the majority of
ministers in his cabinet, to give him 52-5 per cent of the votes for the
Reichstag.
He was not deterred by such a trifle. The Communist deputies, mostly
arrested by now, were not allowed to take their seats, and all the other
deputies but the Socialists — a brave speech of protest came from their
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leader, Otto Weis — were dragooned into voting for full powers to Hitler,
sanctioned by the Enabling Act on 23 March. By this time the first of the
Nazi concentration camps had been established at Dachau near Munich.
The Nazis said these were what Kitchener had invented in South Africa.
They were nothing of the kind. They were carefully thought out places of
detention where anti-Nazis were systematically tormented physically and
psychologically for as long as the Nazis thought fit.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Austrian Chancellor
since the previous May had been the young Christian-Social politician,
Engelbert Dollfuss. Hitler’s coming to power excited all the different shades
of pro-German feeling in Austria, since the Anschluss was the first point
on his programme. It was easy for the Nazis to say that of course Austria
was too small to survive alone and hence union with Germany was the
only thing. In the circumstances Dollfuss dismissed the Austrian parlia-
ment as unworkable in March 1933.
The collapse of agricultural prices had not been so sudden for peasant
Europe as the disappearance of jobs in industry in the German towns and
in Vienna. But in the early ’thirties all social relationships were embittered
by it. Except among the Serbs, Bulgars and Greeks it became easy to
stir up peasant feeling against Jewish ‘moneylenders’. Agitators who
whispered that Communism protected society from depression found a
ready ear among the Russophil Czechs, Serbs and Bulgars. The danger
from Communism, real or imagined, inclined rulers to admire Mussolini
and his methods increasingly. His autarkic or protectionist policy was
lauded and imitated so that tariff barriers impeded the road to economic
recovery. In Hungary and Rumania particularly, middle-class misfits, but
also peasants, organised themselves into Arrow-Cross or Iron Guards
advocating Fascist principles in coloured shirts. This introduced fear and
blackmail into the general atmosphere: in Budapest, particularly, con-
ditions resembled those in Berlin before Hitler came to power.
Mussolini had befriended Hungary since the Italo-Magyar treaty of
April 1927; this meant that he sided with the Magyar revisionists against
the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania) and the
peace treaties. The friendship between Rome and Budapest had a strongly
anti-Bolshevik tang since the Magyars made much of their brief Commu-
nist spell under Kun: they knew, they said, what Communism really
meant but they preferred to forget the White Terror which had followed
it in Hungary.
In 1 932 ahalf-German Hungarian officer called Gombos became Minister-
President of Hungary, thus superseding a period of the predominance of
the magnates under Count Bethlen. Gombos admired Fascist Italy but still
more Nazi Germany. He did not realise that Hitler would later side rather
with Rumania than Hungary: he did not realise the galvanising effect
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Hitler’s success would have upon the German minorities in Hungary,
Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia: these were groups of
people with little political consciousness beyond their fiery Germanness.
In German Austria the tension seemed to become unbearable. With the
German Socialists imprisoned or dispersed the Austrian Socialists felt
caught in a trap. Since Austria was a Catholic country they were more
anti-clerical than their German colleagues while the Austrian bishops
denounced them as Communists. There was pressure from Italy against
the Austrian Socialists because they had revealed gun-running between
Italy and Hungary. At last in February 1934 there were four days of civil
war between the Dollfuss government and the Austrian Socialists. There
were tragic and far-reaching consequences. The Austrian Socialist party
was suppressed after nearly fifty years, and its leader, Otto Bauer, with
the help of the Czechoslovak Minister in Vienna, Fierlinger, went into
exile in Prague. Italian in fluence seemed to prevail in Vienna, and in
March 1934 Austria and Hungary made economic agreements with Italy
in the Rome Protocols. But the unseen victor was Hitler; without the
Socialists Austria could certainly not resist him and the rank-and-file
Viennese Socialists were so embittered against the ‘priests’ and the new
officials imposed on the capital that they were often willing to believe Nazi
talk about being the workers’ champions: this fitted into the traditions
of the Austrian Socialists. The thousand mark visa charge imposed by
Hitler in 1933 on Germans wishing to travel to Austria was calculated to
cause grave economic suffering in the Austrian holiday resorts; this could
be blamed back on to the Austrian government.
‘GLEICHSCHALTUNG’ IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
It was extraordinary to observe that Nazi Germany constantly lost sym-
pathy yet won admiration : opinion in Europe evidently shirked the dis-
creditable evidence which was painful, and jumped at the impressive
slogans. After the Enabling Act all political parties other than that of
Hitler were abolished, and the rights of Bavaria and the other Lander
destroyed in favour of rigid centralisation under the Nazi party. The trade
unions were suppressed in the spring of 1933 in favour of the Nazi Labour
Front, and employers and workers transformed into leaders and following.
The press was strangled. Every newspaper that survived became some
sort of organ of the National Socialist party except for the Frankfurter
Zeitung: this great liberal paper was allowed a little unreal liberty and
survived until 1941. It suited the Nazis to parade this curious mascot —
before the end, indeed, it became Hitler’s property, a birthday present from
his publisher, Max Amann, in April 1939. The effect of seeing and hearing
party slogans at meetings, in the press, on the wireless, everywhere,
warped the attitude of convinced anti-Nazis in spite of themselves.
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Anti-Semitic action was at first sporadic. It began to be systematised in
a boycott of Jewish shops ordered by the Nazi party for i April 1933.
There was not much violence on that day. If foreign papers reported anti-
Semitic incidents, the Nazis pointed out how peaceful things were on
1 April and blamed the Jews for stirring up world opinion against Ger-
many. Gradually it was made impossible for a Jew to practise any pro-
fession: until 1938 it was left at that.
Early in 1934 Hitler ran into some unexpected difficulties. His two
major aims were to destroy the Jews and to acquire territory in eastern
Europe in order to plant German colonists there. The second of these
aims was certain to bring war: therefore Hitler wished to build up a new,
big, efficient army. His old friend Ernst Rohm, the chief of the Storm
Troopers, wished the army to be absorbed by the S.A. men under his
control. The Generals resented this idea, the more so since some of them
knew that the S.A. were really a lot of terrorising thugs. Hitler was against
Rohm’s programme because it would make for a less efficient army.
Hoping to cash in on the tension, some conservative proteges of Papen
persuaded the Vice-Chancellor to make a public speech of protest against
many of the characteristics of National Socialism at the University of
Marburg on 17 June; it was evident that the speech was popular.
Hitler extricated himself from this situation with criminal brilliance.
The most important piece of Gleichschaltung which had been going on
behind the scenes was that of the police: by April 1934 the whole police
machine had come into the control of Hitler’s faithful creature Heinrich
Himmler, who was also the Reichsfiihrer of what was originally a special
bodyguard in the S.A. The members of this bodyguard wore black uniforms
(with brown shirts) and were called Schutzstajfeln or S.S. The evidence
suggests that Himmler and his S.S. induced the army leaders to expect
a S.A. revolt and the S.A. leaders to expect that the army intended to
crush them. On 30 June and 1 July Hitler, using the S.S., arrested and had
executed a number of S.A. leaders including Rohm himself. At the same
time he had murdered the authors of Papen’s speech and a number of
others on the right, including Schleicher, who had criticised Nazi savagery.
The whole thing was justified by Hitler in that he announced that his will
was law. Thus the old legal system which had half survived since the days
of William II was gleichgeschaltet together with the S.A. : this was the last
of the Rechtsstaat until after 1945. After 1934 the Storm Troopers lost all
importance, and German life was dominated by the S.S., who controlled
the concentration camps. The summer which had seen Hitler’s first meeting
with Mussolini and the murders of 30 June and 1 July, a few weeks later
witnessed the murder of Dollfuss by Austrian Nazis in Vienna 1 and cul-
minated in the death of Hindenburg in August and Hitler’s succession to
1 The timing of this seems not to have pleased Hitler (or so he made it appear) : the action
in itself was certainly not unwelcome to him.
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him. Hitler never used the title of President, but as head of state he was
able to oblige every soldier in the army to swear an oath of personal
allegiance to him.
From 1934 to 1938 life in Germany did not seem to change very much.
Employment increased; it did so in other countries but received extra
stimulus from German rearmament; conscription was officially reintro-
duced in March 1935 with its own social consequences. Unless one were
a Nazi official foreign travel was restricted by the shortage of foreign
currency which kept raw materials short. Schacht’s financial brilliance at
the Reichsbank and the Ministry of Economics made the best of the
circumstances (see above, ch. m). Strikingly little was done about housing;
Hitler after all was interested in colonising eastern Europe, not in en-
larging the cities of German home territory.
Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, kept up an atmosphere of
tension especially with regard to Germans said to be persecuted abroad:
in the Saar until the plebiscite in January 1935, in Danzig, Memel,
Czechoslovakia. After January 1934, when the Ten Year Pact with Poland
was made, the Germans in Poland were forgotten until 1939. Goebbels
was the master of Germany’s artistic life now ; the only important artist
to come to terms with him was Richard Strauss, who became head of the
Reich Chamber of Music. The schools and universities were caught up in
the Nazi Youth organisations which put emphasis on para-military
training. The old duelling Corps of the universities, which had survived
through the Weimar Republic, were suppressed: Hitler disliked all aristo-
cratic traditions. The Catholic church had at first extended something like
a welcome to National Socialism, for the first positive recognition the
Nazi state had received from abroad had been the Concordat in July 1933,
and Hitler’s hostility to Communism was welcomed by the Vatican. How-
ever, Catholic and Nazi doctrines were fundamentally irreconcilable, and
Pope Pius XI became increasingly aware of this as his message to the
German clergy, Mit brennender Sorge, made clear in March 1937. The
German Protestants were divided in their reactions to National Socialism,
but from the beginning those who followed Dibelius and Niemoller 1 pro-
tested; they enjoyed a certain support among Reichswehr officers (the
future President Heuss and his wife were close friends of Dibelius). It
should be added that Berlin with Hamburg was always less Nazi than the
rest of Germany; National Socialism was less oppressive there and anti-
Nazi jokes always circulated.
In September 1937 Berlin was obliged to parade for Mussolini. In
November Hitler brought his plans up to date. This meant a final break
with the old pre-1914 ruling class that winter, when Ribbentrop succeeded
Freiherr von Neurath at the German Foreign Office. Generals Blomberg
and Fritsch were disgraced and Hitler himself became commander-in-
1 In July 1937 Niemoller was arrested.
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chief. Ulrich von Hassell was dropped from the German Embassy in
Rome, and when at last the new Ambassador was nominated he turned
out to be Hans Georg von Mackensen, a Junker who had defected to the
Nazis. At this time Papen, who might almost be described in the same
terms, was recalled from Vienna, where in any case an Envoy was about
to become superfluous. All these changes synchronised with the resignation
of Schacht as Minister of Economics and his succession by a tool of the
Nazi party called Walther Funk. Thus the decks were cleared for action.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA I929-I938
At first Czechoslovakia was not seriously affected by the Great Depression :
her finances were sound: she was fairly self-sufficient. The population,
at any rate in Bohemia and Moravia, was reasonably well educated, and
the constitution worked satisfactorily. Here in the ’twenties there seemed
to be the new twentieth-century society freed of an alien aristocracy. Life
in Prague competed with that in Berlin and Vienna; the intellectuals had
the same strong bias to the left and their own special relationship with
the Russians— life was less brilliant than in Berlin but a little saner, less
isolated from its hinterland. An interesting figure of the day was Kafka’s
Milena. Before 1914 she had been a revolutionary Czech schoolgirl thirst-
ing for national independence. Then there was Kafka and his early death;
after translating his novels she became a literary journalist and a focus of
Czech intellectual life. In the later ’twenties not only the Prague Jews but
some of the other Bohemian Germans began to settle down to acceptance
of the Czechoslovak Republic: BeneS’s activities at the League of Nations
— the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister presided over the Assembly of the
League of Nations on the day of Germany’s admission in September 1926
— added to its standing.
Their own circumstances and temperament made it difficult for the
Czechs, whether Masaryk and Benes or the general public, to grasp what
began to happen all round them in the ’thirties. Stalin had chosen the
path of despotism already in 1928. From the time of those elections in
Germany in September 1930 the extreme racialism of the Bohemian
Germans began to revive; the fanatics had remained fanatics but now
people listened to them again. Since they lived on the fringes of the
Republic, without big cities, Prague was their centre too. As the German
economic crisis lifted and Hitler quickly took power, thus seeming to be
the cause of the improvement, in Czechoslovakia the depression set in.
It gravely affected, as depressions often had under the Habsburgs, the
light industries of the Bohemian frontier districts where the Germans —
Sudeten Germans, they now called themselves — lived. This caused great
suffering for which the Czech authorities could be blamed. The old
quarrel blazed up and now Nazi Germany began to finance Sudeten
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German agitators with such success that a new Sudeten German party
led by a certain Konrad Henlein polled 1,249,530 votes at a general
election in May 1935 ; thus it had become the biggest party in the country,
just ahead of the Czech Agrarians.
At the end of that year Thomas Masaryk, now 85, resigned from the
presidency and was succeeded by Bene§; the new situation in central
Europe was a challenge to everything he stood for. After the civil war in
Austria the Czechs scarcely welcomed the corporate state of Dollfuss nor
yet his murder by Austrian Nazis in July 1934 nor the succession of the
clerical Schuschnigg. In the autumn of 1934 the U.S.S.R. was brought
into the League of Nations with a permanent seat in the Council and
BeneS decided to link himself with his French ally in making a cautious
treaty with the Russians. This coincided with Henlein’s election campaign
and brought furious noises from all the nationalistic Germans; Bene§ was
betraying Europe to Bolshevism, they said, and making Czechoslovakia
into a Russian air-base. Blow rained upon blow. Hitler used the oppor-
tunity provided by Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and quarrel with the
League of Nations to remilitarise the Rhineland, an action which probably
emasculated Czechoslovakia’s treaty with France. Mussolini began to
realise that feeling in Austria was not only anti-Italian— which it always
had been— but also essentially grossdeutsch, and in acquiescing in advance
in the Austro-German Agreement of July 1936 he in fact abandoned the
cause of Austrian independence.
In his good-for-nothing days in Vienna, before he went to Munich in
1913, Hitler had been proudly old-style Austrian Pan-German. For him
not merely 1919 but 1866 had to be undone, and Austria and Bohemia
united with Germany. By November 1937 the ‘Hossbach Memorandum’
shows that he had decided to put all this in order : ‘ our first objective must
be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously’ 1 — this
appeared as a single operation to him.
In Prague the Czechs remembered they had lived through bad times
before but they did not intend to be beaten nor to lose the independence
that had dawned so happily. The intellectuals still tried to put their hope
in Russia, but a person so upright as Milena Jesenska realised that the
Russia of the purging trials was both bad and weak, and she abandoned
Communism. 2 BeneS naturally tried to placate the Sudeten Germans and
to strengthen his defences. Even the Sudeten German Socialists who were
in danger from Hitler were hard to placate, and strengthening his defences
brought additional friction with the mass of the Sudeten Germans because
they lived in the frontier districts but he could not count upon their
loyalty.
1 Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, vol. 1, no. 19.
2 She was arrested by the Germans in 1939 and died in the concentration camp of
Ravensbriick in 1944. See Kafkas Freundin Milena by M. Buber-Neumann (1965).
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Schuschnigg, who had succeeded Dollfuss as Chancellor of Austria,
was an ambiguous character. With the intense German feeling of the
Tyrolese he combined ardent Catholicism: the two together seemed to
paralyse him. Like the Weimar authorities in 193 1-2 he was, however,
galvanised into some kind of action by the discovery of Nazi terrorist
plans for Austria. At the instigation of Papen, Hitler’s envoy to Vienna
from 1934 to 1938, he agreed to visit Hitler in February 1938, and was
browbeaten by the German Chancellor into a tentative surrender. On
returning to Vienna he decided to make his own appeal to the Austrians
by holding a plebiscite. Hitler may have feared the result. At all events he
decided to seize Austria without for the moment attacking Czechoslo-
vakia. On the contrary, when on 12 March the German army moved into
Austria, the Czechoslovak Minister in Berlin was assured that no threat
whatever to his country was involved (see below, ch. xxm).
Already in 1933 Hitler’s success in Germany had intoxicated the
German minorities throughout eastern Europe. The absorption of Austria
into Nazi Germany in March 1938 was like a second injection and all the
Sudeten Germans except the Socialists rushed to join Henlein’s Sudeten
German party: they took care to know nothing of the ugly side of the
Anschluss. The Czechs were surrounded by now — the Poles filled the only
gap apart from Hungary — and it cannot be supposed that their partial
mobilisation in May, which so much angered Hitler, really affected his
plans appreciably. In his eyes a Czechoslovak democracy had no right to
exist — it both hampered and irritated him. By the autumn of 1938 he
wanted all the old pre-1914 Austrian Lebensraum under his control: he
wanted it anyway but he began sometimes to admit that he wanted it as
a preliminary to a war against the West.
Owing to the Munich conference (ch. xxm) Hitler destroyed the first
Czechoslovak Republic in two stages ; it seems clear that he would have
preferred to crush it by one quick war. By March 1939 when he set up
the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a Slovakia dependent upon
Germany, and gave Ruthenia back to Hungary, he had acquired tremen-
dous economic power. The Anschluss had put under German control all
kinds of central European banking and industrial connections. But in
Prague the Czechs had built up something of an economic centre for the
Little Entente. Czech bankers had invested considerable sums in Yugo-
slavia, an undeveloped country rich in copper, lead and bauxite: they had
hoped to push their way into Rumania, the only European country other
than Russia then known to produce oil, though in fact they could not
readily compete with the big oil companies which were American, British
and Dutch.
Since coming into power Hitler and his economic advisers, first and
foremost Schacht, had seemed to come to the rescue of the east European
peasantry by buying up their food produce. Germany, in view of her
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currency troubles, paid for such purchases in kind with whatever she
needed to export. Ingeniously the smaller, weaker countries were made
by Schacht to become dependent on her, their currencies linked with
Germany’s. Not very willingly the Yugoslav government had joined in
economic sanctions against Italy during the Abyssinian war; instead of
selling to Italy the Yugoslavs found they could sell more to Germany.
(When the British stopped sending coal the Italians found the Germans
could supply it.) The Hungarians similarly found that in spite of the Rome
Protocols they could sell more to the Germans. With the seizure of Prague
all former Czech investments came into German control, including of
course the great Skoda armament works. A German Mitteleuropa had
been created overnight. It was reinforced by the German-Rumanian Com-
mercial Treaty of 23 March 1939. Oil was becoming more and more
important. This treaty, which was concluded for at least five years, laid
down that joint German-Rumanian companies were to intensify the ex-
ploitation of Rumania’s oil and other natural resources. The Germans,
who had been present here, it has been seen, before the first world war but
then expelled at the end of it, now acquired ‘free zones’ in key positions
in Rumania; they were to provide the necessary equipment for exploiting
the oilfields. This treaty, the Germans presumed, would provide the
model for further agreements ensuring them economic control throughout
south-eastern Europe.
THE ATTACK UPON POLAND EXPANDS INTO
A SECOND WORLD WAR
In May 1939 the treaty which Mussolini called the Steel Pact was signed
in Berlin between Germany and Italy. It was a frankly aggressive treaty
which intensified the intimidation of Europe by Hitler and Mussolini.
It misled world opinion in a way which suited Hitler in that it concealed
the weakness of Italy behind Germany’s strength. Almost immediately
after the conquest of Abyssinia Mussolini had sent large contingents of
Italian ‘volunteers’ to fight for Franco. In its timing the Steel Pact seemed
to crown the success of Franco and the Axis powers in Spain after nearly
three years’ fighting. The Germans had not engaged more than small
groups of airmen, but Mussolini had exhausted both his armies and his
economic resources. As soon as he had signed the pact he began to be
afraid of its consequences. Hitler, however, felt more assured. By now
Mussolini had followed his example and introduced anti-Semitic measures
into Italy. Beyond the frontiers directly controlled by the Germans, the
governments of Hungary, Poland and Rumania were glad to buy favour
in Berlin by anti-Jewish gestures. The time of annihilation was not to
come for two years yet. But the existence of the scapegoat through which
one could curry favour was one of Hitler’s weapons in the war of nerves
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which he manipulated in such masterly fashion. Everyone’s life in eastern
Europe was affected, what they heard or read or said or saw stimulated
anti-Semitism and discouraged tolerance.
It should, however, be observed that Hitler knew that German opinion
was unenthusiastic about war. After the cool reception of his armoured
division in Berlin in September 1938, in November he instructed journalists
to work for greater bellicosity. The fact that this same month saw an
organised pogrom all over Germany, the so-called Reichskristallnacht, with
loss of life and much destruction of Jewish property was not accidental P
from this time onwards the German and Austrian Jews were systematically
ruined economically. After Prague Hitler intended to liquidate Poland
should it not prove pliant, and about this German opinion, in eastern
Germany at least, was keener although the accompaniment of a pact with
Soviet Russia was not likely to be popular.
After Pilsudski’s death in 1935 Poland had been ruled by his former
legionaries, the Colonels, of whom Joseph Beck was the most prominent.
Beck was anti-Western, full of phrases about the understanding of the
Austrian Hitler for Poland, and delighted to whip up feeling against
Czechs over Teschen at the time of the Munich Agreement. Poland did
indeed gain this latter territory at the beginning of October 1938. The
Peasant party, submerged since 1926, was still almost certainly by far the
largest party in Poland, and its leaders, in spite of endless chicanery from
the government, were very active from the time of Pilsudski’s death; they
were indeed able to win remarkable successes in municipal elections in
December 1938. They and their friend. General Sikorski, who was also
a Galician, worked hard to warn their people that Hitler’s friendship spelt
mortal danger : the behaviour of the German minority in Poland began to
look too much like the recent behaviour of the Sudeten Germans. Thus
Beck’s appeasement of Nazi Germany became very unpopular and the
Polish Generals prepared resistance. But their equipment and technical
knowledge were hopelessly out of date, and the country was one of the
poorest, by any standards, in Europe. When Britain and France in the
spring of 1939 offered to guarantee its frontiers Hitler decided upon a
punitive expedition to put an end to Poland; this should teach the Western
powers a salutary lesson that they seemed to have forgotten since Munich.
Stalin’s decision in August to come to terms with Hitler rather than with
the Western powers facilitated Hitler’s design (see below, ch. xxm).
The destruction of Poland combined with the ‘phoney’ war against
France and Britain did not seem to change life in eastern Europe for the
time being: Hungary (enlarged by a big piece of Transylvania in November
1938) as well as Italy seemed to flourish on their neutrality. The Polish
1 The Reichskristallnacht was the night between 9 and 10 November. The excuse had been
the murder by a Jew of a German diplomatist in Paris, but Goebbels would have found
another pretext easily enough.
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war did, however, bring the realisation of Hitler’s true aims much nearer
in two ways. It caused an increase of tension in the Protectorate and a
students’ demonstration in Prague which gave the Nazis their excuse for
closing the Czech university; this led on to the ending of all higher educa-
tion for the Czechs, a part of the destruction of the national life of the
inferior Slav races. Directly, the conquest of Poland provided the positive
gain of Lebensraum. Rather more than the territory lost by Germany to
Poland in 19 19-21 was re-annexed to Germany and the Poles expelled
from it. On 7 October 1939 Hitler appointed Himmler to be Reichs-
kommissar fur die Festigung deutschen Volk stums in charge of bringing in
German colonists: this was not a moment too soon, for Himmler had
already been perplexed as to where to settle Germans who had opted to
leave the Italian South Tyrol after the Steel Pact. The Poles who were
expelled from the homes their fathers and grandfathers had lived in under
William II (when they had been a minority on the scale of the Sudeten
Germans in Czechoslovakia but with no such ‘minority’ rights) were sent
further east to what was denominated the General-Gouvernement ; the
Nazi authorities intended to neglect this economically so that Polish life
there should be doomed to decay. The atmosphere in Germany itself was
not very gay during the winter of 1939-40; sympathies were on the side of
the Finns against Hitler’s new friend, Stalin, in the ‘winter war’.
Then came the euphoria of the seizures and victories of the spring of
1940 and the incredible collapse of France: almost suddenly the Germans
were in occupation of Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries and very
soon of France; from 10 June Italy was an ally, and Spain seemed to be
so. Eastern Europe was either conquered or in economic subjection, and
the U.S.S.R. apparently friendly. And yet victory did not bring an end to
the war: the British Empire would not acknowledge defeat and in the
autumn Italy began an unsuccessful war against the Greeks. The Soviet
Union, moreover, had advanced not only into eastern Poland but also
into the Baltic States and north-east Rumania: would there be a collision
in the Straits near the oilfields or over Finland’s resources in Petsamo?
The problem of manning the German factories began to appear. This was
one reason why the French prisoners were not repatriated ; it also led to
large numbers of Italian workers, as well as Polish ones, being sent to
Germany. The growing labour shortage saved the Slav races; it even
saved some Jews.
By the end of 1940 the war was not won. Hitler had decided in July
that he must conquer perfidious Russia in order, he said, to destroy
perfidious Albion. As a preliminary he must subdue the whole Balkan
peninsula, occupy Rumania and Bulgaria, conquer the Greeks in Musso-
lini’s wake, and cajole the Yugoslavs. When, however, towards the end of
March 1941 the Yugoslav government agreed in return for big concessions
to concur in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940 between Germany,
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Italy and Japan, the population of Serbia and Montenegro erupted in
protest. In August 1939 an agreement had been made between the Serbs
and the Croats, but it had proved a disappointment partly because the
Croats could not resist the hope that Axis pressure might extend their
autonomy; the Serbs, on the other hand, suspected the Axis of wishing
only to weaken the south Slavs and exploit their minerals. The Serb
attitude was partly conditioned by Pan-Slav traditions, by hostility in the
University of Belgrade to the Karageorge dynasty and its tsarist allegiance,
and by suspicion of the Pan-Germans and the German Minority in Yugo-
slavia. Prince Paul, who had become chief regent for the new child-king
when Alexander Karageorgevic had been murdered at Marseilles in
October 1934, was expelled, and young King Peter inaugurated his per-
sonal reign by appointing a new ministry under the chief of the air force,
General Simovic. This was tantamount to repudiating concurrence in the
Tripartite Pact and incurred Hitler’s fury and an immediate German
attack at the beginning of April. Belgrade was savagely bombed and
Yugoslavia fell to pieces for the moment. King Peter and his government
took to flight, Slovenia was divided between Germany and Italy and
Macedonia given to Bulgaria. The veteran terrorist. Ante Pavelic, was
installed in Zagreb as dictator of the Croats under Italian protection. This
was not what the Croat peasants wanted at all and their leader, MaCek,
was soon placed under arrest at his home. Serbia itself was placed under
German military rule. The German army swept on into Greece, where a
mixed German-Italian occupation was set up. Thus the whole of Europe
from Copenhagen to Athens was occupied by German or Italian troops,
and in the grip of the German Secret Police and S.S., which had become
almost identical. Only Sweden and Switzerland retained their indepen-
dence, apart from Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal. Hungary, like
Slovakia, Rumania, Croatia and Bulgaria, was a dependent state subject
to anti-Semitic and liberty-robbing pressures exerted by Himmler.
When Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 he revived the old idea
of a crusade against Communism: the slogan came in usefully again,
though it had lost some of its appeal. Britain apart, an attack upon and
partition of Russia lay at the heart of his ideology: the inferior Slavs must
make room — Raum — for the German master-race and the orders given
for the shooting of Communist commissars were soon equalled by a whole
code of savagery aimed at the annihilation of the Russians, and at the
German colonisation of their land. 1 Life in central and eastern Europe
and in Italy became grimmer. For the officers and soldiers of the German
army, although they advanced with extraordinary speed in 1941, there was
scorched earth and icy cold rather than the pleasures of occupying Paris.
Soon there were Russian prisoners to add to the labour in the German
1 Cf. D.G.F.P. Series D, vol. xiii, no. 1 14. See also Anatomic des S.S.Staates by Buchheim,
Broszat, Jacobsen and Krausnick (1965).
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factories and a little later on German housewives were happy to find that
they could procure Russian peasant girls as domestic servants.
With the war against Russia the reign of terror in Germany and German-
occupied Europe was intensified, particularly so in Bohemia, where the
Munich agreement had left bitterness against the West and had revived
old Russophil sympathies. The Czechs lived in terror of being expelled ;*
in practice their labour was needed in German factories. By now there were
Czech and Polish governments in exile in London. The Magyars and
Rumanians, to some extent impelled by their old anti-Russian feelings,
agreed to become belligerents at the side of the Germans against the
U.S.S.R.
The reign of terror now included the extermination of the Jews by
gassing. For in the summer of 1941 Himmler’s second-in-command,
Reinhard Heydrich, began to give orders to his subordinates such as
Eichmann to carry out this ‘Final Solution’; it was no accident that this
same Heydrich was sent to rule Prague in September 1941 in the place of
the ‘Protector’, Freiherr von Neurath, who went on sick leave. This was
a case of the old ruling class leaving by the back door. The more urgent
military problems of transport became, the more extraordinary it seemed —
as well as unspeakably cruel — that trucks could always be spared to trans-
port Jews to be gassed at Auschwitz. Part of the Nazi technique was to
wrap up such crimes in tremendous mystery. Anyone who hinted at the
truth was denounced as an enemy; thus ordinary people were terrorised
into looking the other way and ‘not knowing’. Since civilised people
found it difficult to believe that such crimes were perpetrated in the
twentieth century it was relatively easy to conceal them.
One of the most important events in the political and social history of
central Europe in 1942 was the attempt made upon Heydrich’s life in
Prague at the end of May; in consequence he died at the beginning of
June. He was the brains of the German Secret Police and probably
irreplaceable, although evil processes which he had set in train, such as
the liquidation of the Jews, continued. The attack upon his life had been
carried out by an exiled Czech and Slovak flown in from Britain and was
not without its symbolic significance. It inevitably brought about a fearful
intensification of the Nazi reign of terror in the Protectorate: the Czechs,
who had always been too matter-of-fact to put their case effectively before
the world in the past, succeeded in imprinting upon the public mind the
crime of the destruction that summer of Lidice and Lezaky, two villages
near Prague where the men were massacred, the women sent to concentra-
tion camps and the children disappeared. The Czechoslovak government
in exile in London succeeded in making Lidice into a byword.
Of all the countries which the Germans had occupied, the mountainous
1 That Hitler thought of this is shown in the Hossbach Memorandum, D.G.F.P. Series D,
vol. 1, no 19.
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areas of Yugoslavia — Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro — were the most
promising terrain for guerrilla warfare, and this flared up very quickly.
Unfortunately two opposed leaders appeared, Dra 2 a Mihailovic who
stood for a narrow, backward-looking Serb allegiance, and the Commu-
nist leader Josip Broz called Tito who was half Croat and half Slovene.
The regime of Pavelic in Zagreb, involving the merciless killing of large
numbers of Serbs and Jews, caused the Croats to become less hostile to
Tito than they otherwise might have been. In November 1942 he felt
strong enough to summon what he chose to call a National Assembly to
Bihac in Bosnia, in fact a handful of Communists and sympathisers with
them. From this time on, however, Tito’s partisans took every opportunity
to fight the Germans, while the followers of Mihailovic lapsed into passi-
vity or made bargains with the Italian forces of occupation. This state of
affairs in Yugoslavia became a running sore of which Hitler was well aware.
Having come to a standstill at the gates of Moscow at Christmas 1941,
Hitler had renewed the offensive in 1942. Towards the end of that year,
in November, the Allies took him by surprise by landing in North
Africa: at the same time the Russian resistance in Stalingrad also sur-
prised him. The battle of Stalingrad, which became so famous, reverberated
through central Europe and Italy all that winter, the Italian, Hungarian
and Rumanian contingents suffering severely. At last came the thunder-
bolt: the German General Paulus and his men surrendered to the Russians
on 1 February 1943, although it was known that Hitler forbade surrender.
In many ways Italy was the most interesting area of Axis Europe in 1943.
Public opinion had betrayed little enthusiasm for Mussolini’s declaration
of war in June 1940, and the Greek war in October was unpopular from
the start as well as unsuccessful. Economic difficulties multiplied, and
Allied air raids increased. The Communist party had kept together certain
cells in the industrial north and as the climate became more anti-Fascist
their activity increased. In March 1943 the workers of the Fiat factories
went on strike for compensation to bombed-out workers; some of the
directors were known to be in sympathy, and the Fascist authorities
seemed at a loss. When the striking in Turin died down, however, there
were strikes in several big factories in Milan. These were the first serious
strikes in Axis Europe. It should perhaps be added that the time to strike
in Germany itself had passed, for the proportion of foreign slave labour
(for this was what it came to) was now so high that strike action was out
of the question. When Mussolini met Hitler at Klessheim in April his
Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bastianini, told Ribbentrop that
with so much labour unrest Italy could not continue the war. Mussolini
was in poor health by now. The battle of El Alamein had put an end to
his hopes in Africa in October 1942 and in May 1943 Tunis was lost to
the Allies (see below, ch. xxrv). Knowing that the Italians wanted to make
peace the Germans increased their personnel of various kinds in Italy and
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this made the Italians more anti-German. Over the Jews nearly all Italians
were opposed to Nazi policy and they succeeded in putting spokes in
Himmler’s wheels. These things were reported to Hitler; the latter had
taken a violent dislike to the king when he — the Fuhrer — visited Italy in
May 1938 and he now blamed Victor Emmanuel. There was something
in this. The king of Italy had disliked coming into the war on Hitler’s side
and was cautiously considering the dismissal of Mussolini and putting out
feelers towards peace. He was, however, afraid of popular pressure and he
waited until late in July. By this time the Allies had landed in Sicily,
meeting no serious resistance except from German troops. On 24 July
Mussolini was induced to call together the Fascist Grand Council. Grandi
and Ciano, 1 now Minister to the Vatican, put forward and carried an
obscure motion in favour of restoring the king’s authority. Victor
Emmanuel had decided to appoint Marshal Badoglio in place of Mussolini,
whom he dismissed and had arrested. Thereupon Fascism seemed magi-
cally to disappear overnight. Hitler, however, sent a special S.S. man to
kidnap Mussolini on 12 September and he obliged the Duce to start a new
Fascist Republic based on Lake Garda. For over eighteen months this
Republic depending on Hitler fought a losing battle against the Monarchy
backed by the Allies. In the spring of 1945 the German commanders in
Italy surrendered unconditionally ; Mussolini took to flight and was caught
and shot by Resistance fighters. It had been a tragic and destructive period
in Italy. Ironically the most active forces who fought with the Allies
against the new Republic were republicans who hated the House of Savoy ;
they fought for a new reformed Italy, above all they fought against Fascism
and National Socialism. In the end the Italian partisans who did this —
it is worth remembering that some of them had fought against Franco in
the Spanish Civil War— distinguished themselves as much as any Resis-
tance fighters anywhere. Hitler was loth to abandon control of the north
Italian factories although the workers in them were in some ways his most
efficacious enemies in Italy.
The fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943 after 21 years in office shook the
Axis world profoundly; listening to the broadcasts of the B.B.C., as more
and more dared to do now, people were adequately informed about it.
In Germany the battle of Stalingrad had had its effect. In 1943, moreover,
Allied air-raids were becoming much more powerful though it seems to
be agreed that it was the disruption of communications rather than panic
which counted. Indeed reactions in Berlin were not essentially different
from those in London although these raids were more destructive and
consequently the evacuation of Berlin was announced on 1 August 1943.
From this time onwards those who could be moved were sent into the
German provinces. Before this people had been evacuated perhaps to
Silesia or East Prussia or even to the re-won ‘ West Prussia’. But now that
1 Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, 1936-43.
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the Russians, though still distant, were advancing it was better to go to
the Sudetengau or to Austria or Bavaria.
In a brutal police-state like that of Nazi Germany it was extraordinarily
difficult to organise any effectual opposition. Indeed it was probably true
that only people in key positions in the army could do so. General Ludwig
von Beck, who was genuinely opposed to the Hitler regime, had resigned
as Chief of Staff in 1938. Officers working with Admiral Canaris in his
Intelligence set-up, the Abwehr, had prepared plans, but in 1943 the Secret
Police arrested several key people there and early in 1944 arranged the
dismissal of Canaris, taking over his powers. At last on 1 July 1944, less
than a month after the Allied invasion of Normandy, Count Claus Schenk
von Stauffenberg was appointed Chief of Staff to General Fromm who
commanded the Reserve army. Stauffenberg was one of those who had
become convinced that Hitler was a criminal who must be destroyed. On
20 July he took advantage of his new appointment in order to place a
bomb near Hitler at a military conference in East Prussia and to find a
pretext to leave immediately by plane for Berlin. Before he left he wit-
nessed the explosion so that he thought himself able to report on arrival
in Berlin that Hitler was killed; he and his friends had worked out plans
for taking over control of the army in Paris and elsewhere. Alas for
Stauffenberg, there were four mortal casualties at Rastenburg, but Hitler
escaped with minor injuries. More excited than ever by this mark of the
favour of Providence, the Fuhrer launched a half-mad campaign of
revenge and frightfulness against the various groups of people who had
unskilfully conspired against him: the last nine months of his life were
indeed a nightmare for Germany and the territories still occupied by the
Germans.
The Allies’ invasion of France had proved successful and on 23 August
1944 Paris was liberated. For eastern Europe, however, that day was more
memorable on account of events in Rumania. Already in March of that
year the Russians had conquered Bessarabia — in the same month the
Germans fully occupied Hungary and suppressed the last vestiges of
opposition there. Since the resignation of King Carol in 1940 a soldier,
Marshal Antonescu, had governed Rumania despotically, not through the
Iron Guard which he despised but along slightly more respectable lines :
his energy, his patriotism and his anti-Semitism had satisfied Hitler.
Although pushed aside by the pro-Fascist trend of the day, Maniu, like
Macek in Croatia, had preserved a wide influence, especially on account
of the protests he was known to have made when the Axis powers forced
Rumania to cede territory to Hungary. The young King Michael, a
contemporary of King Peter of Yugoslavia now in London, urged on by
his mother and Maniu, on 23 August dismissed and arrested Antonescu
and prepared for a Popular Front government. Two days later he and his
advisers changed sides in the war, declaring war upon Germany. The oil-
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fields of Ploesti, still of decisive importance, were thus put at the Russians’
disposal. This was the end of German power in the Balkan peninsula for
the second time since 1900. Bulgaria too changed sides and in October
1944 the Germans were driven out of Athens and Belgrade: Tito, whose
partisans had made an important contribution to the liberation of Yugo-
slavia, was vindicated. In Greece a fight between Communist and national-
istic partisans was to continue for some time; there were no Soviet troops
here to help the Communists.
Meanwhile on 1 August 1944 the Poles staged a rising against the
Germans in Poland in the shadow of the advancing Russians; later in
August there was a serious rising, joined by some Czech volunteers,
against the German-protected regime in Slovakia. These events not only
caused great suffering: they revealed the rift between the Western Allies
and Soviet Russia which provided Hitler with his best hope, the strongest
incentive to him to hold out. For the Russians for six weeks refused to
allow Western aeroplanes to come to the Poles’ help (these planes needed
to re-fuel in the east if they were to do so) because this was the Polish
nation in revolt, not the fringe of individuals who had become Com-
munists. Thus the Germans were able to crush the uprising in Warsaw and
massacre much of its population. The Russian attitude towards the Slovak
rebellion was more ambiguous. The Germans were still able to suppress both
risings just in time for a fresh crisis in Hungary. Here in the middle of Octo-
ber the regent, Horthy, had decided to swallow his Magyar pride and pre-
judice and beg peace from the U.S.S.R. ; his commander-in-chief went over
to the Russians. The Germans then put Hungary in the hands of the Arrow-
Cross leader, Szalasi; they held out in Budapest till the following March,
even launching a last attack there in February 1945. By this time the
Russian armies had swept over Poland into East Prussia and Silesia, but
in addition to a small portion of Hungary the Germans still controlled
Bohemia, proverbially the key to Europe. It was not until April 1945 that
American troops confronted Russian troops there and in Saxony and Bran-
denburg. The fate of central Europe was then decided, at any rate for the
next generation, by unnecessary American anxieties about Japan; in order
to ensure superfluous Russian support against the Japanese, the Americans
withdrew and allowed Soviet troops to occupy Berlin, Vienna and Prague.
None of these places was lost to the West for the moment, but the
Russians had been given the power to take them, like Budapest, under
their control. After the encirclement of Berlin by the Russians Hitler
committed suicide on 30 April.
Social conditions in Axis Europe after the battle of Stalingrad were
highly political ; increasingly people joined the Resistance movements or
helped them or at any rate hindered the authorities through sabotage.
Most people in the towns went very hungry except the Germans themselves,
whose cupboards turned out to be well stocked (unlike 1917-18). With the
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autumn of 1944 the Germans began to feel in danger east of the Elbe; the
Western Allies would soon invade western Germany but one was less
afraid of them. Thus, for the last six months of the war and during a
phenomenally cold winter with air raids, wrecked railways and retreating
troops, people were trying to go west and Berlin ministries to decentralise
themselves. These migrations merged into the growing stream of refugees
directly fleeing from the Russians and their proteges, the Polish Com-
munists, who had by now succeeded in building up to something. It ended
in the Polish-German de facto frontier becoming the line of the Oder and
the Western Neisse rivers. All the Germans in Europe came to live west
of this frontier, in a relatively small area, after 1945: otherwise there is
only a group of about 250,000 German-speaking inhabitants in Hungary.
In the period from 1900 to 1945 profound social change took place in
Germany, Italy and eastern Europe : for better and for worse the aristo-
cracy dominant at the beginning had been destroyed by the end. The
myth that the conspiracy against Hitler in July 1944 was due to ‘feudal
reactionaries’ was nonsense; people from all classes of society were in-
volved although the initiative came perforce from a group of officers, some
with noble names. After this the Russian armies streamed into eastern
Germany, precisely that part of the country where many of the big landed
properties had survived. The widow of Bismarck’s younger son, Bill, told
Countess Donhoff, who was riding to the West, that she was too old to
leave the family estate at Varzin 1 — she did not wish to survive. The
Russians came and she was never heard of again. At Lowenbruch in
Brandenburg a Russian officer with his men prepared to have Frau von
dem Knesebeck shot. But the eighty Russian prisoners-of-war who had
worked on her estate protested with cries of ‘Mamushka, Mamushka’
which saved her life: 2 she had had the courage — and it required a great
deal for it was strictly against Nazi rules — to treat them humanly. This
was the swan-song of the east European aristocracy, its power and its
way of life.
1 See Marion Donhoff, Namen die keiner mehr nennt (1964), pp. 36-8.
! Walter Keitel, ‘Abend liber Schloss Lowenbruch’ in Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 21 January
1965.
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GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, THE LOW
COUNTRIES AND SCANDINAVIA
AT the beginning of the twentieth century, all the major European
states could be characterised by their respect for the principle of
jL \ the sovereignty of the people, and a social order founded on the
predominance of a property-owning class composed of the aristocracy
and the bourgeoisie. This was especially true of northern and western
Europe; with the exception of republican France, the pattern of govern-
ment was that of a constitutional monarchy supported by an electoral
system based on property qualifications which usually excluded any
popular elements from the elected assemblies. Political struggles were
restricted to the two sections — conservative and liberal — of the ruling
class — but neither of them ever thought of modifying the traditional
structure of society in any way. Even socialism, still in its infancy, was
not as yet strong enough to have any real influence on the pattern of
society.
In the course of the following fifty years, however, the structure of
society was to be shaken to its very foundations, partly because of the
increase in population (although the rate of increase was slower here than
elsewhere), but chiefly because of the rise of industry. This was to cause an
upheaval in the social and professional distribution of the whole popula-
tion, and, by altering the balance of power between the different classes of
society, was to bring about a complete transformation of that society’s
institutions and mental attitudes. Two world wars and an economic crisis
of unprecedented magnitude were to follow and in their turn speed up
the rhythm of these transformations.
We are concerned here with those countries of north-western Europe
which, before 1940 at least, were able to avoid a social revolution or a
dictatorial regime, namely, Great Britain, France, Belgium and Luxem-
burg, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. In general, the
evolution of all these countries followed much the same pattern, although
it is not always possible to establish a complete concurrence of events;
there were variations which can be explained by differences in the
character and tradition of each nation, by the differing stages of eco-
nomic development and by problems peculiar to each one of them. Never-
theless, it is true to say that, throughout these countries as a whole,
changes in the political and administrative institutions worked towards
a democratisation of the representative system, an extension of the
functions of the state, an upsurge of socialism which succeeded in curtailing
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the omnipotence of the former ruling class, and a levelling of living stan-
dards — which did not, however, prevent an unequal distribution of wealth
and, to some extent, of power.
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM AND THE ORGANISATION OF SOCIETY
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY
France had adopted the principle of universal suffrage in 1848, but in
Great Britain, although the Act of 1 884 had increased the number of voters
from four to five millions, the franchise was not universal, and plural
voting was possible for persons owning houses or premises in several
constituencies. In Sweden three-quarters of the citizens were denied the
right to vote, and in Holland a property qualification was still in force,
although it was reduced from ten florins to one in 1896; Belgium intro-
duced a system of plural voting in 1893, whereby supplementary voting
rights were granted to heads of families, citizens owning property worth
2,000 francs or providing an income of 100 francs, and those who had
reached a certain level of education. But the proportion of voters to the
population as a whole remained generally low: in France, 26 6 per cent
(1898), in Belgium, 22 per cent (1900), in Holland, 11-9 per cent (1900), in
Norway, 18 6 per cent (1900) and, in Sweden, 7-4 per cent (1902).
The bicameral system was in operation everywhere, but this system was
always tempered by the extensive powers of the upper Chamber, drawn
from a much narrower sector of the population than the lower Chamber,
and also by the influence — considerable but highly variable — that still
remained in the hands of the head of state.
The parliamentary system was as yet securely established only in a
small number of nations: in Norway since 1880, in Denmark since 1901,
and in Great Britain — a model admired by liberals everywhere, where the
queen always chose as her Prime Minister the leader of the majority
party. The system was less successful in France, where the large
number of parties engendered instability in the government, and also in
Holland, where religious and political allegiances gave rise to a variety of
coalitions.
But alongside the old aristocracy which, with the exception of Norway,
remained extremely influential, especially in the upper Chamber and at
Court — in Belgium and Holland, in Sweden particularly and even in
Great Britain — it was the bourgeoisie that governed, sustained by the
clergy and the peasant masses who made up the greater part of the
population, except in Great Britain. Representation was still wholly in
the hands of the ruling class: in Great Britain, there were only two
Labour members elected to the House of Commons in 1900; in France, it
was only with the left-wing election of 1902 that 57 members of the
petite bourgeoisie and of the working class were elected, and they made up
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less than io per cent of the deputies ; in Sweden, a lawyer became a minister,
for the first time, in 1905.
The working class itself, numerically small and with its structure im-
perfectly delineated, remained in isolation. The trade union movement had
its earliest and most important period of development in Great Britain,
whereas its organisation was hampered in France by the memory of the
Commune. The number of union members in Great Britain had grown
from 500,000 in 1885 to 1,250,000 in 1900, but in France the Confederation
Generate du Travail (C.G.T.) had only 121,000 members in 1902, when it
merged with the Federation des Bourses du Travail. On the other hand,
French socialism was very active, although the movement was still
divided into Guesdistes, who rallied to the banner of Marxism, and
reformists. In Great Britain it was not until February 1900 that 129
representatives of the trade unions, the Social Democratic Federation
(S.D.F.) (the only specifically Marxist organisation), the Independent
Labour Party, and the Fabian Society, formed the Labour Representation
Committee, which was given the responsibility of creating an autonomous
group, wholly distinct from the other parties, to be known henceforth
simply as the Labour party.
GOVERNMENT BY THE LIBERAL BOURGEOISIE 19OO-1914
During the first years of the century, political rather than social problems
prevailed. Political democracy could only be brought about by the
granting of universal suffrage, by fortifying the parliamentary regime and
by the transfer of power wholly into the hands of the middle class. It was
over principles such as these that the two sections of the ruling class did
battle — the conservative elements and the liberal elements, however they
called themselves (the Liberal party in Great Britain and Belgium, the
Radical party in France). The Liberals were supported by the working-
class parties (Labour and Socialist), which were as yet of insufficient size
to do more than assist in the struggle. With the gradual fulfilling of the
Liberal programme and the resolving of fundamental problems of a
political character, the nature of the collaboration between the Liberals
and the Socialists was to become more and more uneasy. The Socialists,
having grown impatient of promises and rights devoid of any concrete
value, soon demanded structural reforms which their erstwhile allies were
to refuse.
In 1899 a particularly serious crisis, the Dreyfus affair, had shaken
France. The Republic had seen the army, the church and all those who
sought a return to the past rise against her, and attack her with far greater
violence than ever they had in the days of Boulangisme. The republicans,
from the progressives — now become the Alliance Democratique — to the
Socialists, joined forces to support the Government for the Defence of the
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Republic formed by Waldeck-Rousseau, which included, standing sym-
bolically shoulder to shoulder, a Socialist, A. Millerand, and General de
Gallifet, one of the sabreurs from the days of the Commune. The successive
governments of Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes took five and a half years
to settle the Dreyfus affair completely, for they had to purge the army
high command, arrest and try the leading nationalists and, above all,
reduce the influence of the church, a body of great conservatism which, at
every period of crisis, had mobilised its members into supporting the anti-
republican right-wing parties, in order to combat TEcole sans Dieu’
and the ‘faux dogmes’ of 1789. The purpose of the Act of 1901 was to
suppress the more compromised sections of the church (‘les moines
ligueurs’ and ‘les moines d’affaires’) and to keep the others under the
surveillance of the state. The rigorous application of this Act by Combes,
who succeeded in getting the two Chambers to reject most of the requests
of authorisation that came before them, gave rise to a dispute with the
Vatican and the breaking off of diplomatic relations, and to the separation
of church and state in December 1905. These measures were undertaken in
an atmosphere akin to civil war, fostered by nationalist demonstrations
each time an ‘inventory’ of the possessions of the church was drawn
up or religious communities who resisted the enforcement of the Act were
expelled.
The union of moderates from the Left Centre, the Left and the Socialists
was consolidated by the Delegation des gauches, made up of representatives
of all groups, who joined forces to take decisions of common importance,
and which benefited from the dazzling eloquence of Jean Jaures. Some
moderates were, however, fearful of the recent turn of events and, by
1906, with the advent of the Clemenceau government, the disintegration
of the coalition was already under way, the Socialists having passed a vote
of censure on the brutal suppression of strikes in northern France.
During this period the two principal left-wing groups organised them-
selves finally into Radicals and Socialists. The ‘Radical and Radical
Socialist party’, formed in 1901, was to be the dominant political party in
France until 1940, with members in every government providing them
with a President du Conseil or taking over at least one of the key ministries
dealing with internal affairs — the ministries of Education, of the Interior
or of Agriculture. Representing the middle class and the petite bourgeoisie
of the provinces, it stood for ‘ordre’ and for greater economies; whilst
hostile to the wealthy upper class, it was antagonistic to the claims of the
urban working class ; it was conservative, chauvinistic, and distrustful of
socialism, which was now becoming stronger. At its 1904 Congress, held
in T oulouse, it proclaimed itself the ‘ parti du juste milieu ’, and in favour of
private property. The representatives of the various socialist tendencies —
Guesdistes, Blanquistes and Reformists in favour of participation in the
government — were brought together by a Congress of Unity held in 1905.
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They proclaimed their support for the decisions of the Amsterdam
International of 1904, which had condemned reformism and participation
in government, and became the Socialist party (S.F.I.O., Section Frangaise
de V Internationale Ouvriere). Economic difficulties and the intellectual
prestige of Jaures consolidated its success: from 35,000 in 1905 its
membership grew to 72,000 in 1914, and the number of votes gained leapt
from 830,000 (with 51 candidates elected) in the 1906 election, to 1,400,000
(with 103 elected) in the 1914 election.
The unifying of the trade unions took place in 1902, with the C.G.T.,
which, through its general secretary, Griffuelhes, accorded its full sup-
port to a programme of revolutionary trade-unionism hostile to capitalism
and state control, and favourable to direct action, acts of sabotage and
strikes as a prelude to a general strike. Its complete political independence
was proclaimed at the Congress held in Amiens in 1906. However, only
830,000 workers out of almost 7,500,000 wage-earners were trade union
members, and only 300,000 had joined the C.G.T. French trade-unionism
was thus a very different movement from its British counterpart; a
minority group without any openly avowed connection with the working-
class party, it drew its inspiration from a Marxist programme of class
struggle and violent revolution. This hardening of attitude was the result
of an uneasiness bom of their disappointment with the left-wing coalition
government — the Bloc des Gauches — with its meagre record of social
reform; in 1904, military service had been reduced to two years, but
exemptions had been abolished, and the length of the working day had
been set at ten hours — in mixed establishments only. The demands of the
workers had come up against a barrier of social conservatism erected by
the Radicals. The government of Clemenceau had replied to working-
class unrest and strikes by forbidding a demonstration on 1 May 1906 in
favour of the eight-hour day, and by brutal, even bloody, repression,
using the police and, against the miners of Courridres, the military. This
repression, directed against electricians, building workers, dockers (1907)
and construction workers (1908), culminated in legal measures to prevent
the forming of trade unions by state employees — primary school teachers
who had joined the C.G.T. and postal workers who struck in 1909. Serious
disturbances also occurred in the south of France, where vine-growers
complained of a slump in the wine market, mayors and municipal council-
lors resigned, crowds rioted, the sub-prefecture at Narbonne was burnt
down, and there was a mutiny in the ranks of the 17th Infantry Regiment,
which was recruited locally.
The 1906 election was a triumph for the coalition because of the
application of the principle of ‘republican discipline’, whereby left-wing
voters, there being no candidate with an absolute majority, voted at the
second ballot for the left-wing candidate who had won the greatest number
of votes. The left-wing coalition secured a majority, with 325 seats,
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whereas the right-wing parties were reduced to 174 seats ; the 90 moderates
of the Centre Left, whose co-operation had hitherto been necessary to
form a majority, went over to the Centre Right. But unrest in the working
class and amongst the lesser state employees was a source of concern for
the bourgeoisie, and repressive policies further separated them from the
Radical party. Conflict between the Socialists and the Radicals increased
over other questions — the policy of an alliance with tsarist Russia (at that
time repressing revolution with cruelty), the policy of hostility towards
Germany, as advocated by Delcasse, the colonial policy which caused
Jaures to denounce the Moroccan undertakings of the ‘parti colonial’,
just as, some years later, he was to support the policy of Caillaux which
was aimed at easing the international situation after the Agadir incident.
Not only the Right, but also a large section of the Radicals, disagreed
with the Socialists on all these questions: they were concerned by the anti-
military, pacifist propaganda of the trade-unionists, and by excessively
frequent strikes. Moreover, it was feared that the greatly increased military
and naval estimates, the expenses incurred through the voting of workers’
pensions in 1909, the development of primary education and the purchase
of the Ouest railway system would make it necessary to have recourse to
the income tax proposed by Caillaux. Aided by nationalist propaganda
which international tension further stimulated, the regrouping of the
parties was now under way. With the lining up of the Entente Cordiale
against the Triple Alliance, with Wilhelm II’s initiatives in Morocco,
with the humiliating dismissal of Delcasse in 1906, and the Agadir incident
in 1911, there was a reawakening of nationalism strongly influenced by
Catholicism, at a time when the latter was being firmly drawn towards the
principle of integration with the state. The Right was given to a clamorous
cult of Joan of Arc, beatified by Pope Pius X, to extolling the colonial
work done by Marshal Lyautey, known not to be fond of the Republic,
to titillating the chauvinistic and jingoistic patriotism of the petite
bourgeoisie. The rupture came in 1910 when Briand broke a railway strike
by calling up the men into military service and obtained a vote of confidence
from a majority of Radicals, members of the Centre and of the Right.
This new anti-Socialist majority was fully revealed when men of the
Centre Left were appointed to three of the four most important posts of
the regime — Paul Deschanel becoming President of the Chamber of
Deputies, Raymond Poincare President of the Republic, and Louis
Barthou President du Conseil ; it was this same majority that voted the
law extending the period of military service to three years.
With its unity re-formed, the Left was victorious in the 1914 election : on
a platform of rejection of the three-year law and of opposition to ‘the
folly of armament’, 300 left-wing candidates were elected, including
130 S.F.I.O. Socialists, as against 120 right-wing candidates. There was
nevertheless a majority in favour of maintaining the three-year law.
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Although no previous assembly had ever comprised such a large number
of left-wing deputies, the slide to the right was undeniable since the
Radical bourgeoisie now turned its back on its former allies, who, in its
opinion, were calling for reforms that were likely to endanger the country,
property, security and order.
Political evolution in the Scandinavian countries also worked towards
a democratisation of institutions and the progress of the social-democratic
parties. It was the least rapid in Sweden, owing to the greater influence of
the aristocracy and monarchy there. Nevertheless, from 1906 on, the Right
was, step by step, eliminated, and the Liberal party, created in 1901,
finally secured a majority in the Lower Chamber. In 1907, electoral reform
reduced the property qualifications for the Upper Chamber and limited
plural voting; the size of the electorate was doubled and, by 1914, the
Social Democrats had become the chief party in the country. The king
had not yet fully accepted a parliamentary regime, however ; on 6 February
1914, during a demonstration by 30,000 nationalist peasants, he openly
declared himself in opposition to the Liberal government of Staaff, and
forced it to resign. In Denmark from 1906 the left-wing opposition gained
strength; the government of the Radical leader, Zahle, was brought to
power by the peasantry, hostile to the great landowners, and by the Social
Democratic party.
Democratic reform went deeper in Norway. It had been impeded by the
struggle for independence which culminated, in June 1905, in the dissolu-
tion of the union with Sweden and in the creation of a constitutional
monarchy confirmed by referendum. Henceforth the Liberal party was
divided into two sections, the more progressive of which, the Venstre,
joined forces with the Social Democratic party and formed the govern-
ment from 1908 to 1919, except for the period 1909-12. Progressive
legislation concerning the use of natural resources and foreign investment
was passed. It was also in Norway that the powers of the monarchy were
most reduced; the right of sanction in constitutional matters was sup-
pressed in 1913, the coronation and consecration ceremonies having been
abolished in 1908.
In Holland, where power remained in the hands of the three denomi-
national parties, it was not until 1913 that the Liberal coalition and the
Social Democrats obtained a majority in the Upper Chamber (55 seats
out of 100) and introduced universal suffrage. The struggle was even
harder in Belgium, where the Liberals, exasperated by the domination of
the church, allied with the Socialists; their coalition succeeded in 1908
in forcing their opponents to consent to compulsory military service
(previously a system of selection by drawing lots had been in operation,
with facilities for substitution) and, in 1914, to compulsory primary
education. There was much working-class unrest from 1906 on, and strikes
were brutally broken. As elsewhere, this unrest split the Liberal party,
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some of whose members took fright : it took the shock of war to clear the
final obstacles to the adoption of the eight-hour day and votes for women.
In Great Britain the election of 1906 was the signal for decisive changes.
The electoral success of the Conservatives over the divided Liberals
and the infant Labour movement in 1900, and the noisy celebrations of
imperialist victory in the South African War, did not prevent anxiety
over the economic situation from growing. Competition from Germany
and the United States, and the protectionist policy of all the major powers,
created many difficulties for British industry. As early as 1903 Joseph
Chamberlain had proposed the adoption of an imperial preference system,
which was to be the basis of a future imperial federation. Conservative
opinion was split ; many industrialists, chiefly Lancashire exporters, were
hostile to this leap into the unknown. The Liberals were supported by the
Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.), itself favourable to Free Trade, and by
the Nonconformists, who were dissatisfied with the 1902 Education Act ; in
1905 Balfour resigned. Campbell-Bannerman, a Liberal moderate,
formed a cabinet of Liberal imperialists and Gladstonian radicals, includ-
ing the trade-unionist John Burns, and won an overwhelming victory in
January 1906; the Liberal party, out of power for ten years, won 399 seats,
the Unionists (of whom two-thirds were Tariff Reformers) 157, Irish
Nationalists 83 and Labour candidates 29.
The new government abandoned the imperialist policy, and passed the
Trade Disputes Act in 1906, quashing the Taff Vale decision of 1901
which had threatened trade union funds. Campbell-Bannerman died
in 1908 and was replaced by Asquith, with Lloyd George as Chancellor of
the Exchequer. Many reforms were carried out : the reform of the army by
Haldane, of the navy by Lord Fisher, the Old Age Pensions Act, awarding
a weekly pension of 5 shillings to those over 70, and the voting of an eight-
hour day in the coal mines. Above all, there were tax reforms to finance
these measures, but which seemed to many people designed to produce a
redistribution of wealth. The 1909 budget was aimed chiefly at the rich;
it reduced income tax for heads of families, but levied a special tax on
petrol and motor vehicles, and a duty of 20 per cent on the unearned
increase in the value of land whenever it changed hands. The House of
Lords rejected it. Two general elections were needed to secure these
reforms and, at the same time, to take a decisive step forward towards
democratisation by reducing the power of the Lords.
The conflict between the Liberals and the Lords was similar to the one
that had existed in France for a century and which had attained a degree
of unheard of violence in the course of the Dreyfus affair. For the Liberal
bourgeoisie, the Conservative Lords had all the disdain of ancient noble
families ; for the numerous little men in the Liberal and Labour ranks —
Lloyd George himself was the son of a schoolmaster and had been brought
up by his uncle, a shoemaker — and for the newly rich middle class, they
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had nothing but contempt. They had undertaken a policy of systematic
opposition to the Liberal projects. Lloyd George’s defence of the budget
was vigorous, and succeeded in making the Lords look odious and
ridiculous. In January 1910 275 Liberal candidates were elected as against
273 Unionists, with 40 Labour members and 82 Irish Nationalists. The
problems raised by the budget were thus resolved, but battle continued in
the constitutional field: it was imperative to specify — and to limit — the
powers of the Lords. The breakdown of George V’s attempts at concilia-
tion led to a further election, with another defeat for the Conservatives
and the passing of the Parliament Bill, after the threat of creating a
number of Liberal peers. The duration of the Lords’ veto was reduced to
two years, but, by way of compensation, the maximum life of a parliament
was reduced from seven to five years.
These victories were made possible because the Labour party and the
Irish members always voted with the Liberals, who in their turn could
remain in power only by retaining this support. The alliance had therefore
more solid foundations than its French counterpart ; although soon to be
imperilled, it was not yet broken. Great Britain now passed through a
period of intense social discontent. The working class complained that it
did not share in the general prosperity, with wages standing still and
purchasing power diminishing. To these economic factors was added a
feeling of growing frustration amongst the workers, who condemned their
representatives for their feebleness and for following too closely in the
wake of the Liberals, as, for example, when the latter refused to quash
the Osborne judgement upheld by the Lords in 1909 (which jeopardised
the trade unions’ political levy); or again, when it was realised that the
National Insurance Act of 191 1, inspired by Bismarck’s legislation for the
working class, was to be financed not by the Treasury but in part by the
workers themselves. It was therefore not surprising that the influence of
syndicalism which dominated the French C.G.T. should have affected the
British movement, as did that of the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the
World) which was also favourable to strikes, boycott, the use of violence
and a general strike. The Marxist tendencies of the small Socialist Labour
party penetrated the ranks of the Labour party, and numerous tracts and
pamphlets were issued denouncing the timorous and illusory policies of
the Labour leaders and calling for direct action. The Daily Herald, which
first appeared in 1912 and which George Lansbury edited from 1913,
spoke in favour of energetic action and condemned the Liberal alliance.
There followed a number of strikes in 191 1, 1912 and 1913 among miners,
railway workers, cotton textile operatives, seamen, dockers and naval
dockyard workers, and the military was called in on Merseyside and in
South Wales with, at times, resulting bloodshed. On the eve of the war,
the Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen and transport workers fore-
shadowed a general strike.
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In another domain, the Liberals’ obstinate refusal of votes for women
exasperated the small groups of suffragettes, who now turned more fre-
quently to demonstrations and violence. Furthermore, the serious nature
of the Irish problem and the threat of civil war in Ulster halted social
legislation and weakened the Liberals and their majority.
The Conservatives, like their French counterparts, were in fact far
from resigned to their defeat. Beaten over their home policy in 1910,
they now laid stress on imperialism and nationalism: supporters of the
empire and the monarchy, they opposed the introduction of Home Rule
in Ireland which was to come into effect in 1914, and they encouraged
Sir Edward Carson to form an army of Ulster volunteers determined to
resist it by force. This threatening move resulted in the creation of the Irish
Volunteers, and the threat of civil war loomed nearer, aggravated by a
mutiny of officers of a section of the British troops stationed in Ireland in
March 1914.
Although the Liberal government carried forward its programme of
social legislation (labour exchanges, 1909, health in surance and a limited
scheme of unemployment insurance, 1911), the gap could only widen
between the Liberals and the Labour supporters. The efforts of Liberal
reformers who sought in no way to alter the existing social order were
incapable of providing effective solutions to the political and social
problems now being raised. The party that had been triumphant in 1906
began to fall into decline.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES
I9I4-I92I
The outbreak of war in 1914 forced all the belligerent governments to
settle a number of unforeseen problems. As for the neutrals, their day-to-
day activities were also upset by the cataclysm, which spared them to a
partial degree only; they too had to improvise solutions to the problems
that now confronted them.
In the countries at war, a ‘ union sacree' was spontaneously set up. In
France, there was a party truce, in spite of the assassination of Jaures by
a disciple of the Action Frangaise. Strikes ended everywhere. Agitation
by the suffragettes and the Irish came to an end in Great Britain, and even
the most confirmed pacifists, such as Ramsay MacDonald, voiced their
support for the recruiting campaign of September 1914. In France a
government of National Unity was set up by Rene Viviani, which included
Jules Guesdes, a Marxist Socialist, and Albert de Mun, a Conservative
deputy. In Great Britain, Asquith formed a coalition government in
May 1915, comprising 12 Liberals and 8 Conservatives, with Arthur
Henderson of the Labour party and Lord Kitchener, War Secretary since
the outbreak of war.
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The violation of Belgian neutrality gave rise to widespread indignation,
as did the reports — grossly exaggerated — of German atrocities in Belgium :
added to this was the feeling of fighting for a right that had been violated.
A wave of self-righteous patriotism and nationalist demonstrations of the
most elementary sort swamped all spirit of lucid analysis. Resistance
came from men like Romain Rolland, a few rare Socialists and Labour
supporters, socialist trade-unionists on the Clyde and in South Wales, and
the federation of metal workers in France.
Unanimity was, however, soon to disappear; as the war dragged on,
the old differences came to the fore again. Reports from the front quickly
showed up the scarcity and misuse of arms and munitions, the waste of
human lives and material, and the arbitrariness of military leaders en-
dowed with extensive powers and beyond governmental control. The
murderous and ineffective offensives launched by General Joffre, and his
absurd ‘gnawing’ tactics throughout 1915, earned him the most severe
criticism both from the combatants themselves and from their representa-
tives in the two parliaments. The Ministers of War, Messimy in 1914,
GaUieni in 1915 and Lyautey in 1917, all complained of the encroachment
of the High Command and of its resistance to any sort of control. In
Great Britain, the campaign in the Dardanelles caused Admiral Fisher
and its instigator, Winston Churchill, to resign, and the introduction of
conscription in January 1916 brought opposition from Labour representa-
tives and a number of Liberals. Criticism of the shortage of munitions and
of the weakness of the governments resulted in the creation of the posts of
Minister of Munitions, and brought to power men determined to conduct
the war with ferocious energy: Lloyd George in December 1916 and
Georges Clemenceau in November 1917. Power was thus concentrated in
the hands of a few men: the War Cabinet, with five members (which
became the Imperial War Cabinet in May 1917, with the addition of
General Smuts and other Dominion representatives), and the Cabinet de
Guerre, created towards the end of 1917, and comprising the President du
Conseil, and the Ministers of War, of the Navy, of Munitions and of
Finance.
Veritable war-dictatorships were set up everywhere, for decisions had
to be taken outside the parliaments, which were called upon to ratify
them after the event. The Defence of the Realm Acts (D.O.R.A.), passed in
1914, placed all powers in the hands of the government in matters con-
cerning the armed forces and the civilian population, including the power
to detain people without trial. In France the same powers were conferred
on the government by declaring a state of emergency. The necessity for
secrecy in matters concerning military operations led to the extension of
censorship of the press and of mail ; it was held to be detrimental to national
defence and the morale of the combatants to criticise the government’s
decisions, the behaviour of civil servants, profiteers and those who shirked
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at home. The press, particularly that of the left wing and of the opposition,
such as L' Homme Libre — Clemenceau’s L' Homme Enchaine — was con-
stantly having articles blacked out. These abuses, which were especially
flagrant in France, were much fewer in Great Britain, where there was
greater respect for the traditional defence of the rights of the individual.
Concessions were, however, wrested from the governments. In France,
the two Chambers met in secret committees to hear reports that could not
be made public, and control over the army was effected by ‘deputes en
mission de controle’. The fact that the Cabinet was almost completely re-
shuffled seven times between 1914 and 1918 — only once (the fall of
Painleve and his replacement by Clemenceau) was this caused by an un-
favourable vote in the Chambers — bore witness to the gravity of the
situation. Similarly in Great Britain, a coalition government was formed
by Lloyd George as a result of revolt against Asquith’s alleged indolence,
which the Conservative leaders Bonar Law and Carson fostered, and
which The Times helped on.
State surveillance was extended to many unexpected fields : agricultural
and industrial production, transport, employers’ profits, employees’ wages,
the length of the working day and disputes between employers and workers.
Public administration was considerably extended; in Great Britain the
Civil Service was doubled between 1914 and 1923, and new ministries
were created — Munitions, Food, Pensions, Labour and Blockade in 1917,
Air and Reconstruction in 1918. France witnessed the creation of under-
secretaries or secretaries of state for Munitions, Food, Health, Military
Aviation, Military Justice and the study of inventions of military im-
portance.
Once again, social problems took on their former urgency. In 1915
trade union leaders relinquished the right to strike in exchange for the
setting up of a national consultative committee and the appointment in
every factory of works representatives. Similarly, in France, Albert
Thomas, the Minister of Munitions, created workers’ representative
committees in factories concerned with the war effort. A labour force
had to be found for these factories, entailing ‘ dilution’ in Great Britain —
the use of non-skilled labour — which resulted in protests, although the
trade unions finally gave way. The Munitions of War Act banned strikes
and instituted compulsory arbitration and powers to move a worker from
one factory to another ; it also prevented workers from leaving their jobs
without a leaving certificate (abolished in 1917) and this, coupled with the
rising cost of living (33 per cent from August 1914 to July 1915), caused
the first major strike of the war, in the Clydeside area (February 1915),
followed by the South Wales miners in July. The institution of shop
stewards followed and soon spread — men chosen from the works floor,
whose influence counterbalanced that of the trade union leaders, who were
often suspected of collaborating with the government.
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Thus, from 1916 on, the working-class movement revived. There was
new interest in the International, which was divided into those for and
those against the resumption of relations between the Socialist parties of
the countries at war (in December 1916 the majority of members at the
national congress of the S.F.I.O. had been in favour of this). The move-
ment was also divided over the questions of participation at the Zimmer-
wald congress of 1915 and the Kienthal congress of 1916, the ‘aims of war’
and the Russian revolution. The Bolshevist programme of ‘ peace without
annexations and indemnities’ met with much favour amongst a large
number of Socialists and Labour supporters. After visiting Russia with
the French delegates Cachin and Frossart, Arthur Henderson, a member
of the Labour party, declared that Britain should support the proposed
conference of international socialists in Stockholm ; this was approved by
1,840,000 votes against 550,000 at the conference of the Labour party held
on 10 August 1917. But the issue of passports for Stockholm was with-
held, and this caused Henderson to leave the War Cabinet. At the same
period, strikes broke out in France, where, in May and June 1917, 71
industries were affected by strikes in St Etienne and Paris. And, behind the
front lines at Le Chemin des Dames, the army, decimated and dis-
couraged by the failure of Nivelle’s murderous offensive of 16 April,
mutinied. At the front itself, and behind the lines, weariness at a war
that dragged on with no hope of a victory was felt everywhere. Clemenceau
assumed the mantle of a veritable dictator, instigating the prosecution of
businessmen and Radical and Socialist politicians— such as Malvy, the
Minister of the Interior, and Joseph Caillaux — who were accused of
defeatism or of relations with the enemy. He thus silenced every criticism
of the war and of the total mobilisation of the country’s resources to
counter the German offensives in the spring and summer of 1918.
When the end came, the elation produced by victory and peace, and the
illusion that it had been ‘the war to end wars’, were not enough to wipe
out the memory of often useless losses, the ruin and the suffering of those
four years. Bitterness and anger mingled with joy and relief, and a deep
desire for change — a reaction against the uncontrolled discipline imposed
by civil and military authorities — was encouraged by the example of the
Russian revolution, which exalted the hopes of all those who had suffered
so grievously and who were sickened at the sight of so many profiteers.
Councils of soldiers were reported in Egypt in 1919. In Britain there
were demonstrations among the troops over delays in demobilisation;
during a riot in Glasgow the red flag was hoisted and several people were
injured; there were strikes in the Yorkshire mines, the London Under-
ground, and finally a general railway strike in 1919. In Ireland, after the
Easter Monday rising in 1 9 1 6, rebellion had spread and was, by now, a full-
scale war. The time of ‘ the troubles ’ had started. In France, too, strikes
broke out, and the violent protests against the continuance of the war,
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now being waged against Russia, caused a mutiny amongst several units of
the Black Sea fleet.
Governments in England, France, Belgium, were thus forced to make
concessions in order to deflate these dangerous popular movements. In
France, the eight-hour day was made law (1919). In England Lloyd
George, armed with unparalleled prestige conferred upon him by victory,
very cleverly called for an early election. The Liberal party was now split
into Asquithian Liberals, who never forgave Lloyd George for his
questionable loyalty in 1916, and those who remained faithful to him.
Threatened with isolation between Conservatives and Labour, now deter-
mined to fight alone, Lloyd George accepted an alliance with the former.
There followed the ‘coupon election’ in which all the friendly candidates
received a letter of endorsement signed by Lloyd George and Bonar Law.
The coalition won 478 seats (335 going to the Conservatives), as against
28 for the Asquithian Liberals and 59 for the Labour candidates, who now
represented the official opposition. Menaced by splintering as far back as
1914, the Liberal party was now ruined; these elections ushered in a
period of twenty years of almost continuous Conservative hegemony.
However, under the direction of the ‘Welsh Wizard’ the coalition re-
mained in power until October 1922. The Housing and Town Planning
Act was passed in 1919, giving housing subsidies to local authorities, the
University Grants Committee was set up, and, in 1920, the Unemployment
Insurance Act was passed to overcome the problem of unemployment. In
1921 the one hundred and twenty railway companies were merged into
four, and in 1922 the British Broadcasting Company was formed, with
a broadcasting monopoly. But the economy committee under Sir Eric
Geddes recommended economies that undermined part of Fisher’s
Education Act of 1918. The nationalisation of the coal industry demanded
by the miners was rejected, though endorsed by a majority of the Sankey
Commission. In Ireland, a vicious war composed of ambushes, the
arresting of hostages, torture, and summary executions, in which Irish
terrorists matched the Black and Tans (the British special police, one of
whose exploits was setting fire to Cork), came to an end with the recogni-
tion of the Irish Free State as an autonomous unit within the Empire, with
the exception of the six counties of Ulster (ch. xm). This measure, which
dissatisfied the Conservatives, contributed to the break-up of the coalition.
The return to political life was more slowly effected in France, with the
election in November 1919 of a ‘Chambre bleue-horizon’ comparable to
the post-war House of Commons in Britain. A new electoral arrangement,
a compromise between the majority system and that of proportional
representation, instituted the system of list voting on a departmental
basis, the premium going to the majority candidate and the remainder of
votes being shared proportionally. This resulted in a coalition of the
Centre and Centre Right, the Bloc National Republicain, with 437 seats
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out of 613, the opposition consisting only of 68 Socialists and 88 Radicals.
It was the most right-wing Chamber in France since 1876. Although
Clemenceau had already crushed strikes caused by the rapid and sharp
rise in the cost of living amongst workers in Paris (on 1 May), miners in
the north, weavers in Rouen, railway and Metro workers, the victorious
Right could not forgive him for having voted the eight-hour day and
legal status for collective agreements, or for his anti-clericalism. In
January 1920, he was passed over, as candidate for the Presidency of the
Republic, in favour of Paul Deschanel, the moderate president of the
Chamber of Deputies.
Belgium, which had been invaded, saw its wholly Catholic government
move to Saint Adresse near Le Havre and become, by the addition of a
few Liberals and Socialists, a government of National Unity. The
occupied territory was administered by the Germans, who aggravated the
disharmony between the two linguistic groups — Flemish and Walloon —
by favouring the former; a Flemish university was created in Ghent, and
a Raad van Vlanderen set up, which entailed the separation, administrat-
ively, of the two parts of the country. After the armistice, Albert I
formed a government around a tripartite union — 6 Catholics, 3 Socialists
and 3 Liberals — and promised universal suffrage, trade union liberties,
linguistic equality and the alliance of capital and labour. The election of
November 1919 — with suffrage extended to all the adult male population
— resulted in an anti-clerical majority for the first time: 30 Liberals and
70 Socialists against 73 Catholics. Consequently, local electoral rights
were extended to women in 1921 and the Catholics received, by way of
compensation, an agreement on equal subsidies for state and private
schools; liberty of association was conceded, as were old age pensions,
the suppression of obstacles to the right to strike, and the eight-hour day.
The other countries of north-west Europe remained neutral. Although
they doubtless profited considerably from providing Germany with raw
materials and foodstuffs, they suffered as a result of submarine warfare,
inflation and rising prices. They were forced to operate a policy of
governmental intervention in order to regulate food supplies and prices
by a complex system of distribution. They too found it necessary to censor
the press in order to prevent newspapers from expressing support too
overtly for one side or the other. All these measures dissatisfied public
opinion, and it was again felt necessary to yield to popular pressure; thus
Denmark introduced the eight-hour day, revised the constitution and ex-
tended suffrage to women at the age of 25. In Sweden, the Hammarskold
Cabinet, notoriously pro-German, was forced to resign in 1917, and was
replaced by a coalition of Liberals and Social Democrats led by Hjalmar
Branting — the first European government, outside France, to include
Socialists. In Norway the introduction of proportional representation in
1919 ended representational inequality, which had been considerable,
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and proved favourable to the Social Democrats. Holland also adopted
universal suffrage (as did Luxemburg in 1919) and the eight-hour day.
On all sides, universal suffrage reduced the role of the Liberal bour-
geoisie to that of a make-weight or an arbiter (in Holland, Sweden and
Great Britain) and encouraged the development of the popular parties
(in Holland and Belgium). Where the Liberals did retain some of their
importance, it was because they had taken over the role of the Con-
servatives. Wherever the parliamentary regime was firmly established, the
rights of veto and dissolution fell into disuse, except in those cases where
the latter was used to find a way out of an inextricable situation or to
hasten the advent of urgent reforms. The only example of such a conflict
was the case of the highly pro-German grand duchess of Luxemburg,
who was forced to abdicate in 1919 and was replaced by her sister; and,
with the referendum of 18 September 1919, the solution applied con-
formed in every way to the democratic principle.
THE INTER-WAR YEARS I92I-I939
When the peace treaties came into effect, serious problems faced the
countries that had been at war. Great Britain had not been invaded, but
she had suffered heavy losses of human life and materials, and she too
had her ‘devastated areas’ : industry which needed to be reconverted and
re-equipped, the fleet to be rebuilt, former markets to be won back,
American and Japanese (and before long German) competition to be
faced ; the national debt was very heavy, and the balance of payments was
threatened. Exports had to be redeveloped and the pound restored to its
old supremacy, for this had formerly been the condition of her prosperity.
In France the terrible bloodshed of the war had cost 1,750,000 lives,
and the birth-rate fell below that of 1913; the ruins remained to be built
upon, but the country’s debts were made worse by having to pay for war
damage and for pensions to war victims of all categories. The international
situation was sombre. France and, to a lesser extent, Britain assumed an
attitude of resolute hostility towards Russia, whose revolutionary propa-
ganda they feared. Germany was also the subject of their distrust, all
the more so since she seemed to be trying by all possible means to evade
the restrictions of the Versailles ‘Diktat’. France, particularly sensitive
on this question, insisted on strict compliance with the terms of the treaty,
with a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law symbolised by
Poincare. She contracted a series of onerous alliances with some central
and eastern European countries and, at the same time, re-equipped and
maintained the army at great expense.
Economic and social problems thus became the chief preoccupation of
the government. Because of their technical character and urgency, parlia-
mentary machinery produced only a meagre yield; decisions were made
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too late, or at the wrong time, and this resulted in disquieting stagnation
which individualist political philosophy, of the sort that had made
nineteenth-century Liberals see the state as the natural enemy of public
liberty, did nothing to remedy. State intervention was looked upon with
disfavour. But the industrialisation of society brought with it restrictions
which were incompatible with certain liberties hitherto considered as
essential and inalienable. The resultant crisis amongst Liberals became
increasingly aggravated.
This crisis was accompanied by a transformation of the classes of
society and of the balance of power between them. The working class, or
rather the wage-earning class, grew in size and in importance. Although
they remained in the minority, workers’ organisations now became mass
movements: in France the C.G.T. grew from 600,000 in 1914 to 2,000,000
in 1920; in Great Britain the Trades Union Congress, re-organised and
now allied with Labour in a National Joint Committee, grew from
representing 4,000,000 members in 1915 to 6,500,000 in 1919, and to
8,300,000 in 1920. The S.F.I.O. obtained 1,700,000 votes at the 1919
election (300,000 more than in 1914) and, in Britain, the Labour party
flourished, reunified by Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb, with its
former structure reinforced by the creation of local branches. This laid a
solid basis for expansion, supporting the programme of moderate
democratic socialism drawn up by Webb, Labour and the New Social Order,
which urged the planning of production and distribution. But, although the
wind appeared to be in its favour, the working class was in fact irresolute
and divided. The wave of enthusiasm caused in 1917 by the Russian
revolution stimulated the left wing of the Labour party into hostility
towards the policy of intervention in Russia; workers refused to load
munitions bound for Danzig in 1920, and committees of action were set
up to implement the slogan ‘Hands off Russia’. But this unity went no
further, for the direct action that the Communists were calling for was
repugnant to the majority; and so the Communist party of Great Britain
was founded in July 1920. Although it continued to influence intellectuals
and certain trade unions in a very real way, it was to gain only scant success.
In France the failure of the strikes in 1919 and the lack of success at the
election of 1920 were discouraging, and the hopes of a rapid national
revolution were destroyed. Opposition to Bolshevists and Reformists led
to a rift in the Socialist party at the Tours Congress in 1920; the majority
declared its adherence to the Third International and in favour of re-
taining Jaures’s admirable newspaper, V Humanite, whereas the minority
rallied to Leon Blum. In the trade union movement, the majority remained
in the reformist C.G.T. under Leon Jouhaux, and the minority formed
the Confederation generate du Travail unitaire (C.G.T.U.), connected
with the Communist party. This division resulted in an all-round weaken-
ing — in 1925 the C.G.T. numbered 50,000 only, and the C.G.T.U. 400,000.
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The workers in both countries were thus to receive only a small share of
the profits from this period of prosperity and rising prices which far out-
stripped the nominal rise in wages. The situation was aggravated by
unemployment in Britain, with 858,000 out of work in December 1920 and
1,664,000 in March 1921. By May 1921 the figure had reached 2,500,000;
it dropped to 1,400,000 in 1922, but never fell to less than a million until
1939. In France working-class unrest became sporadic and intermittent,
and finally died out in discouragement.
Faced with a working class that was isolated, split and frustrated, the
bourgeoisie too underwent a transformation. The old hierarchy had been
thrown into confusion; landlords and property owners, people with fixed
incomes, state employees, private employees and workers were all affected
by the rise in the cost of living. But inflation benefited producers, middle-
men and debtors. Social inequality was as great as before the war, and the
new industrial bourgeoisie, made rich by war and reconstruction, feared
the growth of the working class and its claim to restrict the employers’
authority on the factory floor — even when the working class’s programme
was as moderate as Labour’s. The ‘divine right of the employer’ brought
him close to the traditionally conservative powers — the church, the army,
and the former aristocracy that his forefathers had fought in the nineteenth
century. During the war a particularly active and powerful pressure group,
the Federation of British Industries, had been formed in Britain; similarly
in France the Comite des Forges, the Comite Central des Houilleres, the
Union Generate des Industries Metallurgiques et Minieres and the Comite
Central des Assurances were formed. They all, directly or indirectly,
worked towards influencing the judiciary and the financiers, and bringing
pressure to bear on the decisions of the government and of the assemblies,
all the more so since the economic scope of the state had widened and state
protection was now indispensable for so many problems. These groups
influenced the press, the administrative cadres who were responsible for
the implementation of government decisions, and the elections — the
Union des Interets Economiques shared out subsidies from the employers
amongst candidates, and in 1924 the Radical party received funds from
the Comite des Assurances. They also worked through family connections,
through the social relationships uniting members of the ruling class,
which was now tending to merge with the former clerical, conservative
upper-class society whose reactionary ideology it absorbed. A new Right
was thus brought into being which was no longer either liberal or parlia-
mentary, which supported the nationalism that only the Action Frangaise,
founded in 1908, had stood for before the war. Drunk with the victory
of 1918, and with the fact that France was now the strongest military
power on the continent, the new Right showed systematic hostility to-
wards ‘eternal Germany’ and refused to make any concessions to her.
With disdain for humanitarian principles (according to Maurras, nothing
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but ‘moonshine’ and alien to French Catholic tradition) and for the
League of Nations, it called for an authoritarian regime, which it con-
sidered to be the only one capable of formulating a policy of strength and
greatness, the implementation of which could be possible only if the nation
were united by stem discipline that was respectful of the traditional
social hierarchy. Thanks to the coherence of its theories, untiringly
repeated by its editor-in-chief, Charles Maurras, and to the talents of the
polemicist Leon Daudet, the Action Frangaise was highly influential in
Conservative and Catholic circles (or, at least, for the latter until it was
condemned by Rome in 1926). Its hate-ridden propaganda against
‘meteques’ (dagoes), Jews, freemasons, Communists and Socialists, and
against ‘capitalisme anonyme’, the brutality of its Camelots du roi at
public meetings, and its systematic calumny finally created an atmosphere
of contagious violence. Its pseudo-anticapitalism drew to its ranks
members of the petite bourgeoisie, tradesmen whose number had increased
and whose profit margins were dwindling, craftsmen and minor industrial-
ists working with out-of-date and inefficient equipment, and feeling them-
selves threatened by large combines and competition from more advanced
countries. Anxious for the future, these groups of men, unenlightened,
simple-minded and chauvinistic, were very ready to fall back on violence
as a solution. Mussolini’s Fascist blackshirts, which the Action Frangaise
praised and set up as a model, were recruited from identical social groups.
1924 saw the appearance of the Patriotic Youth Movement, organised to
fight against Communism, to offer armed opposition if need be; in 1925,
a dissident member of the Action Frangaise, G. Valois, created a blue-
shirted Fascist splinter group, the Faisceaux. These groups, taking the
behaviour of the Communist party as an excuse to revive the spectre of the
threat of revolution, sought thus to justify their use of violence and to
acquire the support — and the subscriptions — of the right-thinking section
of the public.
This anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary ideology was fostered and spread
by the press, which was mostly in the hands of ‘moneyed power’; the
five major dailies (the so-called newspapers), all the Paris evening papers
and almost all the magazines voiced their more or less open support for
nationalist and conservative policies.
Whilst the political struggle in France had to do with the regime itself
and with the principles upon which it was founded, political conditions
were different in Great Britain. The division into Conservative and Labour
fairly represented different conceptions of the production and distribution
of wealth, but neither of the two parties sought to question the funda-
mental principles of the regime. Furthermore, the basically conservative
character of the British working class coupled to its great unwillingness to
adopt Marxist theory and practice directed the party towards moderation
and caused it to reject vigorously all attempts, collective or individual, at
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affiliation with the Communists. In France, on the contrary, the existence
of a powerful revolutionary party made both the unification of the Left
and the creation of a durable majority impossible, and served only to
aggravate the fears of a bourgeoisie all too ready to turn to the extreme
Right and to look forward to the coming of a ‘Saviour’. But in Great
Britain the upper class felt itself less in danger, and the aristocratic element
continued to play an important part in the House of Commons, com-
prising perhaps 40 per cent of its members between the wars.
There were thus, in both France and Great Britain, two quite separate
populations drawn up against each other; caught between them, Liberal-
ism was doomed to disappear or to cease being itself. The drama of the
Radical Socialist party in France was that of the Liberal party in Great
Britain. Similarly, in Belgium, the Liberal party after 1920, having
completed its programme, found itself tugged in separate directions by the
doctrinaire patrician class of the bourgeoisie, senior Civil Servants and
industrialists who viewed the clergy unfavourably, but who were also
fearful of working-class unrest, and by groups of primary school teachers
and members of the petite bourgeoisie who were very hostile to the ‘ priest
party’. The latter were to join forces with the Socialist party, as did many
left-wing Liberals who rallied to the Labour party, thereby strengthening
the moderate elements in both parties, whilst the groups with right-wing
tendencies moved further towards the Right.
The weakness of European currencies was at once the cause and the
occasion of these transformations. Governments and public opinion,
long since accustomed to monetary stability, were thrown into confusion
by its disappearance. The machinery of exchange and of the balance of
trade broke down, provoking a rise in nominal wages and in the cost of
living; the result was worsening inflation, the fall of the franc compared
to the pound, and the rise of the dollar over both, with a consequent
run on the franc and a flight towards safe holdings. Because of this, the
capitalist oligarchy was able to impose its will on the governments, using
the fall in value of national moneys as a lever to oust those that proved
intractable and to return orthodox governments to power.
In Great Britain, Bonar Law succeeded Lloyd George in October 1922,
with 345 Conservatives in the majority, against two rival Liberal factions
— 60 with Asquith and 57 with Lloyd George — and 142 Labour members.
This was the first time that the Labour party had won more seats than the
combined Liberal groups. When the ailing Bonar Law made way for
Stanley Baldwin in 1923, a new election on the issue of a protective tariff
reversed the majority. There were now 258 Conservatives whereas the
Liberals, unified in the defence of Free Trade, numbered 159 and the
Labour members 191. A Labour government was thus formed under
Ramsay MacDonald in January 1924 — since Labour was the larger of the
Free Trade groups — but being in the minority and dependent on the
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Liberals it was not able to undertake any specifically Socialist legislation.
It fell after nine months over a minor issue, and was replaced by the
Conservatives in the general election of 1924. The election was a further
debacle for the Liberals, who lost 1 16 seats and were now reduced to 42,
and for the Labour party, who won only 152 seats, although the number
of votes cast for them — one-third of all those recorded — had gone up. The
Conservatives gained 161 seats and won in all 415. There could have been
no greater proof of the irremediable decline of the Liberal party.
The Baldwin government remained in office for five years, and, jointly
with Briand, carried out a pacificatory policy in Europe (the Locarno
Pact). At the same time, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston
Churchill, now back in the Conservative fold, pursued a policy of defla-
tion; the return to the Gold Standard in 1925 set the pound at its former
value once more, but also caused a reduction in exports, raising their
price on the world market. It was also a cause of the General Strike which
broke out in 1926. The coal-mining industry had for a considerable time
been the one most affected by the export crisis and unemployment.
Frequent strikes bore witness to its state of chronic crisis. A national coal
strike against a reduction of wages began on 30 April 1926. It was
supported by the General Strike (3 May) in which workers in the transport,
gas, electricity, printing, building and heavy industries came out in
sympathy. It was a trial of strength, for the Conservative government,
determined to break the strike, had long since made arrangements to
keep public services working, protected by the police and the army.
Public opinion proved to be hostile to the apparent attempt to bring
pressure to bear on the elected government; the trade union leaders,
many of whom had been dubious about the strike in the first place,
capitulated on 12 May. Mine owners took advantage of their victory to
worsen the living conditions of the miners, and in 1927 the government
passed the Trade Disputes Act, which banned sympathetic strikes and
altered the unions’ political levy. Trade union membership fell, and the
revolutionary tendencies within the T.U.C. lost ground. The govern-
ment took a few steps to ease social tension, including legislation for
widows’ pensions and contributory old age pensions, and the reform of
local government. In 1928 the principle of equal electoral rights for mem-
bers of both sexes was enacted, making suffrage completely equal and
universal.
In France, events followed a similar pattern. The Radical coalition
under Herriot, like the Labour interlude under Ramsay MacDonald,
interrupted a sequence of Conservative governments. In both countries
there was opposition between similar groups of interests — those of the
ruling class and those of the working class — and it was by a more or less
similar process that a solution was sought. But the pattern of events was
not identical. France had not experienced the open wound of permanent
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unemployment, nor such a serious crisis as that of 1926. On the other hand,
in France the extreme Right was much more virulent, and the very active
Communist party made for constant tension. Nevertheless, each time a
left-wing government came to power, a financial crisis succeeded in top-
pling it. The technique was simple: since tax payments were unevenly
spaced over the year, the governments were forced to ask for loans from
private banks, from the Bank of France and the savings banks, which in
turn demanded guarantees and concessions. Moreover, the floating debt
held by the banks — ninety-one million Treasury bonds in 1924 — was a
powerful weapon, because of the constant threat that they might be
presented for redemption.
The 1924 election replaced the Bloc National by the Cartel des Gauches,
a coalition of Radicals and Socialists, the latter offering their support but
not their participation to Herriot. They wished, by their union, to re-
introduce the anti-clerical legislation that the Bloc National had pushed
into the background; in this way, they provoked the Catholics into form-
ing the National Catholic Federation, presided over by General de
Castelnau and directed by elements of the extreme Right. Mass demon-
strations were organised in which the faithful affirmed their determination
to resist the application of new measures. Furthermore, the Locarno Pact
and appeasement with Germany were strongly criticised by the nationalists,
and eventually financial difficulties gave the Right the opportunity to over-
throw the government. To face the burden of reconstruction costs and
the national debt (swollen by pensions and interest on loans, which were
further enlarged by an over-generous evaluation of war damages), the
government introduced measures intended to make the situation more
healthy, to put an end to the flight of capital and to tax evasion — the
‘carnet de coupons’ and the ‘carte d’identite fiscale’. 1 The Socialists in
their turn called for the enforced consolidation of Treasury bonds and a
tax on capital. The confidence of holders of savings faded away; the
value of the franc, quoted at 90 to the pound in December 1925, fell to
165 in May 1926 and to 240 in July. The threat of a Socialist deputy to
‘ prendre l’argent oil il est ’ was made much of by the press. Herriot, who
had succeeded in obtaining the indispensable loans from the Bank of
France only by giving up his projected ‘carnet de coupons’, was forced
to draw back before the ‘ Mur d’argent ’. Even so, he was overthrown by
the senate. From then on, bankers used the threat of a ‘plebiscite’
amongst the holders of short-term bonds as a form of blackmail. Within
two years, 1924-6, six governments were to follow each other; and the
Radical coalition finally splintered in July 1926. Raymond Poincare
then formed a government which gained the support of the bankers and
1 The ‘carnet de coupons ’would have made it possible to keep a check on the encashment
of stocks and shares by their holders, and the ‘carte d’identite fiscale’ would have served as
a record for checking statements made in income tax returns.
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stabilised the franc at a quarter of its 1914 value; the majority of Radicals,
having broken with the Socialists, lent their support to a right-wing
financial policy. The system of a double ballot was re-established for the
election of 1928, which gave the victory to the Right, thanks to a volte-
face by Radical electors who, giving up the principle of ‘Republican
discipline’, voted at the second ballot for the Right or Centre Right
candidate rather than the Socialist heading the list after the first ballot.
It was thus the Right and the Centre Right that governed France between
1928 and 1932, firstly with Poincare and Tardieu, then with Briand and
Laval, two grands bourgeois and two former Socialists gone over to the
Right.
From 1931 in France, but elsewhere from 1929, Europe was in the grip
of a depression which, although widespread, was not equally severe
throughout the continent. More particularly, its consequences were not
everywhere equally serious from the political point of view, as may be
seen from a consideration of one of the most characteristic features of
European history at this period — the spread of fascism. The whole of
eastern, central and southern Europe was to succumb to the infection,
whereas the countries of north-western Europe were able to resist until
1940. For some of these states, however (Great Britain, the Scandinavian
countries, Holland), the upsurge of fascism was merely episodic, like a
bout of passing fever. But elsewhere, in France and Belgium, it was much
more, and was to have consequences which continued to be felt long after
1940. These two groups of states may therefore conveniently be dealt with
separately.
The world-wide economic depression which followed the Wall Street
crash was particularly severe in Great Britain, where, for almost ten years,
unemployment had involved never less than 10 per cent of the labour
force. In November 1929 there were 1,326,000 out of work; the figure
leapt to 2,500,000 in December 1930, and was just under 3 million
officially (perhaps 3-75 million actually) in 1931 and 1932. The MacDonald
government, formed after the Conservative defeat in May 1929, was a
moderate one, backed by 288 Labour members against 260 Conservatives;
it dependedfor itsexistence, however, on the goodwill of the 59 Liberal mem-
bers. The depression came as a shock for all three parties, and those who
failed to perceive its real causes were many. Amongst these was, without
any doubt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Snowden, who adopted a policy
of the strictest orthodoxy and rejected any measures that might have resul-
ted in a budget deficit. Almost alone to have understood what were the
necessary steps to take was the small team grouped round J. H. Thomas,
the minister in charge of unemployment, which was made up of Thomas
Johnston, Sir Oswald Mosley and George Lansbury, and which drew up a
plan of action. It was obstructed by Snowden, who contented himself with
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palliative measures — the Housing Act of 1930, to speed up slum clearance,
the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931, to help the farming community,
and the Education Bill, which took the school-leaving age up to 15 and
which was thrown out by the Lords. In July 1931 Sir George May’s
economy committee forecast a deficit of £120 million and proposed in-
creased taxes and economies, chiefly the payments to the unemployed.
The publication of this report created panic and the pound fell so sharply
that even loans to the Bank of England from Paris and New York were
unable to restore it. MacDonald resigned on 24 August and George V
invited him to form a coalition government ‘to save the pound’. The
political consequences were serious. The trade union and Labour leaders
opposed the ‘National Government’, except for 12 Labour members of
parliament, whereas the Liberals and Conservatives supported it. The
new government accepted many of the recommendations of the May
committee. But it failed to save the pound: after a continued run on
gold, it was necessary to abandon the gold standard, and the pound fell
from $4.86 to $3.40. The ensuing election awarded the government a
massive majority, with 554 Liberal, Conservative and National Labour
members out of 615 members of parliament; the Conservatives gained
three million votes, chiefly at the expense of the Liberals, with the
Labour party losing 1,375,000 and retaining only 52 seats. The new
government was predominantly Conservative. Neville Chamberlain, who
replaced Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced Tariff
Reform and thus instituted in February 1932 those duties that his father
had advocated in 1903. Preferential duties were levied on imports from
within the British Empire.
Henceforth, policy consisted in short-term measures taken under the
force of circumstances by men who were prudent but incapable of under-
standing the new situation that had resulted from the slump in inter-
national trade and the upheaval that the ambitions and the armaments of
the dictatorships had caused in the balance of power. These years ‘ that
the locust hath eaten’ were tragic ones, ‘a time of tragically lost oppor-
tunities, of last chances never seized’. 1 In 1936 the Special Areas Act gave
assistance to the transfer of workers to those regions where new industries
were developing. Marketing boards and subsidies helped agriculture; a
loan helped the completion of the Queen Mary. The production index
(1929 = 100) had fallen to 84 in 1931, but rose to 93 in 1933 and to 124 in
1937, owing chiefly to the success of the building industry. The standard
of living of those workers who had work rose also, thanks more to the
balance of trade than to the efforts of the government, since foodstuffs and
raw materials from overseas now cost far less as a result of the collapse
of world prices. Nevertheless the standard of living of the unemployed,
who remained numerous in certain ‘distressed areas’ — Tyneside, the
1 David Thomson, England in the 20th Century (1964), p. 127.
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Tees, Scotland and South Wales — continued to be low, geared as it
was to the dole, which barely permitted workers to live at subsistence
level.
At a time when fascism, exploiting the wretchedness and the despair of the
unemployed, was spreading through central, eastern and southern Europe,
the countries of north-western Europe were also, to a greater or lesser
degree, attracted by the movement. Not even Great Britain was to escape
from its clutches entirely. The movement founded by Oswald Mosley
showed up all too clearly the disarray created in men’s minds by the
obvious failure of the traditional parties, and may be regarded as typical.
Sir Oswald Mosley had been a member of the small group of Labour
ministers which, in 1930, had drawn up a plan to combat the depression.
Although his plan received the favourable attention of the annual con-
ference of the Labour party and won over a million votes — it was defeated
by 205,000 votes only — Mosley felt rejected and created a new party,
the British Union of Fascists (B.U.F.) which comprised various fascist
groups. He obtained the support of the Daily Mail and certain subsidies
from Italy, and was thus able to set up local units with a fairly solid
organisation behind them. The movement collapsed after a meeting in the
Olympia hall in London in June 1934 when Conservative opinion was
revolted by the brutality of its supporters in scuffles with the police and
members of the Left, and by its violent anti-Semitism. The Labour party,
in opposition since 1931, received a further defeat at the 1935 election,
when it won 154 seats. The Spanish Civil War, the Abyssinian affair
and the aggressive policies of the dictatorships aroused the party to the
danger of war, but it opposed rearmament from distrust of the govern-
ment. The leaders, essentially moderate, also opposed the setting up of a
popular front in Great Britain and, at the beginning of 1939, they expelled
Cripps for advocating it.
The uneasiness produced by the policies of Chamberlain, Prime Minister
since 1937, spread throughout all the parties. Rearmament started in 1936
and was accelerated after the Munich settlement in 1938. Unemployment
fell gradually from 1933, though there were 1,800,000 out of work during
the winter of 1938.
The depression affected the three Scandinavian countries with varying
degrees of severity. They followed Great Britain’s example in abandoning
the gold standard in 1931, and unemployment grew, chiefly in Denmark,
where there were 200,000 men out of work in the winter of 1932, although
in Sweden the figure was less than that for 1922. Malaise in rural districts
also came to the fore at this time, especially in Denmark, where agricul-
ture, relying chiefly on exports, was hit hard by customs barriers. The
depression also resulted in the creation of a dangerous social tension,
apparent in the development of Communism within the trade unions on
the one hand, and in the creation of small fascist parties on the other. Only
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the Social Democrats were everywhere in the majority; since 1929 they
had dominated the Danish parliament, they came to power in Norway in
1935 and regained the majority in Sweden in 1936. Their financial and
economic programme was without originality, and was not even orientated
towards Socialism. Like the old Liberal parties that they had now replaced,
they were in agreement with the bourgeois parties in believing that state
intervention was indispensable; they differed from them only on the
question of how to effect this intervention. They were allied to the
Agrarians in Sweden and Norway and to the Radicals in Denmark, in
order to widen their political scope. They concentrated on promoting full
employment, public works and increased wages, and on improving the
peasants’ lot with guaranteed prices and premiums on exports. The three
countries made a customs agreement, the Oslo Convention (1931). The
economic crisis was cut short in 1934 in Sweden, but not until 1936 in
Denmark, which experienced serious strikes. The threat of fascism was
thus without substance. In Denmark there were never more than three
Fascist members of parliament, and in Norway, where Quisling founded
the Nasjional Samling, and gained a measure of support amongst in-
dustrialists and army officers, no Fascist candidate was ever elected to
parliament. Only in Finland did the extreme Right make any progress;
since the acquisition of independence in 1917 and the ensuing civil war
that lasted until 1920, difficult conditions had favoured such a develop-
ment. Finland had adopted a presidential type of constitution and
carried through a programme of agrarian reform. But the presence of a
large Communist party and the proximity of Soviet Russia made the
Finnish Right aggressive and uneasy and enabled them to secure the out-
lawing of the Communist party in 1923. Lapua’s movement, nationalist
and anti-Communist, organised a march on Helsinki by 12,000 peasants
in 1930 and caused the government to fall. It was dissolved because of its
excessive violence, but only to be replaced by a ‘National Patriotic
Movement’ with distinctly fascist leanings, which in its turn was dissolved
in 1938.
Dutch political life was perfectly calm by comparison, in spite of the
great number of parties — seventeen, of whom there were never less than
ten represented in the government. Stability was guaranteed by proportional
representation, and the number of seats held by each party never varied
by more than 4 per cent from one election to the next. Here too the
Liberal party was growing weaker : reduced to ten members in 1 9 1 8, it had
fallen to four by 1937. The depression caused the devaluation of the florin
in 1936 and the controlling of foreign exchange; Holland also joined the
Oslo group. A small National Socialist party was founded by Mussert, an
engineer, which was opposed by a government made up of Liberals and
members of the religious parties, to which one Socialist member was
added, for the first time, in 1939.
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The fact that the depression struck France later than other countries
may be explained by her archaic structure; except for certain sectors
where a limited number of large firms had adopted modern production
methods, France was still a country of artisans and small producers —
more than a third of the wage-earners were still employed in under-
takings comprising under five people, and in the field of commerce,
87 per cent of the businesses had five employees or less. The bourgeoisie
was afraid of anything that looked like a spirit of adventure, and found
investment and the renewal of equipment repugnant. Academic and
political eloquence stressed the virtues of small-scale saving (the ‘woollen
stocking’ method), small-scale farming, the craftsman class (which was
supposed to be the only one capable of producing ‘quality’) and the
superior nature of a so-called balanced economy — balanced in reality by a
large mass of peasants who lived in wretched conditions. Technical
progress was at times denounced as ‘the source of economic anarchy
and moral disequilibrium’. Technological progress was alleged to be the
cause of unemployment, with the result that, during the few months
before the depression hit France, men waxed eloquent about the prudence
and the wisdom of pursuing a policy of stability, without realising that it
was nothing more than the weakness of the country’s production potential
that was fending off the depression. The relatively low unemployment
figure — 1,000,000 in 1934-5, with over 3,000,000 partially out of work —
was due to the fact that a great many foreign workers who had come to
seek work in France were now returning home. It is therefore not to be
wondered at that the ruling class, as blind when faced with the experience
of the New Deal as they were ignorant of the theories of J. M. Keynes,
sought to counter depression by the worst of solutions — deflation,
ruinous economies in order to re-establish a balanced budget, whatever the
cost, and a tardy decision to devalue the franc, in December 1936
(Great Britain having devalued in 1931 and the U.S.A. in 1933), at the
very moment when other countries were overcoming the effects of the
depression with policies of rearmament and public works. The steps taken
were demagogic and ineffectual ; rents and salaries of state employees were
reduced by 10 per cent in 1935 ; state control of agriculture was introduced
to improve the marketing of wine and sugar : new planting of vines was
forbidden, and surplus crops were processed to make them useless for
consumption. A Malthusian control was exercised over certain professions ;
it was forbidden to set up new shoe shops, Uniprix stores, and mobile
shops. On the whole, this legislation penalised all profitable undertakings
in order to protect small property-owners and small marginal producers
whose costs were too high.
Traditional Liberalism was, to an increasingly obvious degree, in-
capable of solving the problem of the depression and countering the risk
of war. The ’thirties thus saw the development, in France, as in all the
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other liberal countries, of crises whose roots went very deep — the crisis of
liberalism and of the parliamentary system. Both Chambers, in fact, were
to see their functions restricted by the increasingly frequent application of
‘decree-laws’ and ‘full powers’ after 1934. The regime was all the more
incapable of adapting the old political framework to modem economic
problems for being under attack from a factious Right and a revolutionary
Left. Up till now, there had been only governmental crises; now there was
a state crisis. Public opinion was discouraged and exasperated by the
repeated failures of the parties which came successively to power. The
solutions put forward were varied. The Communist party, weak in Belgium,
where the Workers’ party refused any sort of alliance with it, was firmly
established in France; the 1,000,000 votes it had gained in 1928 had grown
to 1,500,000 by 1936. Its aim was a Communist regime brought about by
revolution followed by a proletariat dictatorship as a temporary step.
The advent of Hitlerism caused a change in tactics in favour of an alliance
with the parties of the Left in a Popular Front to hold fascism and war at
bay.
The Socialist parties were deeply divided amongst themselves. In
Belgium, as in France, Marxism was being questioned by a wealth of
revisionist doctrines. The most notable exponent was Henri de Man, who,
after having lived for many years in Germany, where he taught at the
University of Frankfurt, continued his work within the Belgian Workers’
party. In 1927 he published Au dela du marxisme, in which he rejected the
materialist interpretation of history in favour of a psychological one,
stressing spiritual values, the spirit of equality and the feeling of universal
brotherhood. ‘The Socialist movement is as much the executor of demo-
cracy, which the bourgeoisie has deserted, as the accomplisher of the
Christian ideal, which the Church has betrayed.’ With Socialisme
constructif, published in 1930, de Man moved even further from Marxism.
The collapse of German socialism after January 1933 caused him to seek
an answer to the threat of fascism — the depression must be strangled at
the earliest possible moment, since it was propitious to fascism, by the re-
establishing of full employment, the nationalising of credit and the crea-
tion of a mixed economy, partly nationalised — coal, electricity and a
section of the steel industry — and partly open to private enterprise, this
latter under the influence of the state through credit, commercial and
fiscal policies. These were the aims of his ‘Plan de Travail’, which he
persuaded almost the whole of the Workers’ party to adopt at its Christmas
1933 Congress, and whose neo-Fabianism met with a reserved welcome
from Leon Blum and de Vandervelde. Henri de Man became a minister
in 1935, in both the Van Zeeland and Janson governments; but he was
never able to put his Work Plan into operation, and, with his faith in
parliamentary democracy shattered, he resigned in 1938.
The idea of a Plan having spread throughout French Socialist circles,
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Montagnon presented a programme which drew its inspiration from this
idea to the S.F.I.O. Congress in 1933. ‘Socialism,’ he said, ‘in the present
disorder, must be made to appear a haven of order and a pole of authority.’
Adrien Marquet was to use much the same language: ‘Order must be
created, authority affirmed, the nation admitted’, at which Leon Blum
declared that he was ‘epouvante’ (horrified). Marcel Deat, in his Per-
spectives Socialistes, published in 1930, exposed his ideas for ‘socialising
the nation’ — capitalism was to be driven back by the use of the anti-
capitalism of the middle classes, the artisans, small traders, small farmers
and employers, since the fundamental problem was not the question of
property, but of power and profits. And so Neo-Socialism came into being.
Reform of the state and of the parties was also the subject of study and
planning by the Right and the Centre. In L’epreuve du pouvoir (1931) and
L'heure de la decision(ig24 ) Andre Tardieu, who had played a considerable
part in the Centre Right over the previous decade, suggested a complete
overhauling of the parliamentary regime: restoration of the state by
strengthening the executive power and restricting the powers of the two
Chambers, which would lose the right to initiate expenditure. Stability
would be assured by using the right to dissolve parliament. He also
proposed votes for women, the referendum, and the banning of strike
action by state employees. Emmanuel Mounier, a Catholic of far less
conservative outlook, founded in 1932 a review called Esprit, which was to
become very influential. An apostle of ‘personalism’, he was both anti-
capitalist and an enemy of bourgeois democracy and of socialism. This
period saw the birth in right-wing circles of a great many more or less
ephemeral movements which put forward plans for ‘renovation’, for
creating a ‘new order’ with the intention of going beyond the old Right-
Left dichotomy and of reconciling neo-liberalism and neo-traditionalism.
Conservatives and Catholics were attracted to the idea of ‘ the corporate
state’ which, they believed, would put an end to class struggles and be a
guarantee of social tranquillity. Attempts were also made by groups of the
extreme Right to win the peasants over to the ‘corporate state’ idea, by
means of an anti-parliamentary programme; the peasantry was the only
‘healthy’ element in the country, while the parliamentarians, ‘pounds’,
‘vendus’, were sacrificing its interests to those of industry and Jewish
finance. There were only two realities within a strong state — one’s work
and one’s family. Except for minor details, this was the platform on which
the Comite de defense paysanne of Dorg£res, the Parti Agraire of Agricola
and the Union des Syndicats agricoles of Le Roy Ladurie now fought.
None of these movements was very influential; but this was not the
case with those movements that were genuinely fascist. The examples of
Germany and Italy spread to France, adding strength to the desire for
direct action and the use of violence. The bourgeoisie, feeling itself in
danger, responded with those same reflexes generated by fear that had led
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to the massacre of the insurgents in June 1848 and of the Communards in
1871. The anti-parliamentary tendencies of Boulangisme and an anti-
Dreyfus type of nationalism reappeared in the form of armed Leagues
using Nazi and fascist methods. A large number of those who felt threat-
ened were not fascists, but they admired Mussolini who was establishing
the reign of ‘order’, and they used the threat of the Leagues — and
occasionally let them off the leash — to achieve their aims. The danger was
thus a serious one, and the period 1934-6 was even more critical in France
than that of the Dreyfus affair, for the factious elements were now
receiving help from outside.
These Leagues were supported by the major reactionary and nationalist
associations: the National Catholic Federation, the National Union of
Combatants, the League of Tax-payers, the chief daily newspapers and
the weeklies Gringoire and Candide. They grouped all those who longed
nostalgically for a strong state into the storm-troops of the Camelots du
Roi, the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Solidarity Frangaise and the Croix de Feu
organised, on a military basis, by Lt.-Col. de la Roque with the help of
E. Mercier, the electricity magnate. These groups grew rapidly in import-
ance. Others were the French Popular party created by Jacques Doriot
after 1936, and the Comite secret d'action revolutionnaire (C.S.A.R.),
known familiarly as the ‘Cagoule’, which stocked arms and received
subsidies from the Fascists in exchange for carrying out acts of vengeance
— the murder of Carlo Roselli — or of provocation, like the attack on the
offices of the Patronat Frangais and the Front Paysan. The demonstration
organised against the ‘Republique des Camarades’ on 6 February 1934
took advantage of the Stavisky scandal to call for a government that would
put an end to disorder. The demonstration turned into a riot, twenty-five
people were killed and many more wounded. Under pressure of this the
Daladier government, although it had a majority in the Chamber, resigned
and made room for a government under a former president of the Republic,
Gaston Doumergue, a Radical gone over to the Right, and who now
called a truce. His Cabinet contained one of the Neo-Socialist leaders
(Marquet), one of the leaders of the ex-servicemen, and A. Tardieu,
Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval. Doumergue and his successor, Laval,
adopted a policy of all-out deflation which, whilst it failed to improve
the financial situation, succeeded in antagonising the greater part of
public opinion.
The bloodshed of 6 February led to a regrouping of the forces of the
Left. Those who were attached to the Republican ideal drew closer, and on
12 February a more or less complete general strike and massive demon-
strations by workers in Paris and many provincial centres were organised
in answer to the attempted coup de force of the 6th. Under the slogan
‘le fascisme ne passera pas’ there was a rallying of forces. Socialists and
Communists signed a pact of ‘unity of action’, a ‘committee for anti-
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fascist action and vigilance ’ was set up under scholars like Paul Rivet and
Langevin, which gained much support in intellectual circles, and all the
left-wing parties without exception, from the Radicals to the Communists,
formed a coalition for the defence of the Republic, known as the Rassemble-
ment populaire or, more commonly, the Front populaire. Its programme
consisted chiefly in a list of steps to be taken to defend liberty and peace,
to restore purchasing power, to create the Office du Ble (to regulate the
price of grain), to nationalise the Bank of France and, as financial
measures, to create a fund for war pensions, to institute a progressive tax
on income and to suppress tax evasion. No structural reforms were,
however, implied by these measures.
The two major trade union movements joined forces in May 1936 and
became henceforth the C.G.T. Elections held in May and June of the
same year resulted in a majority for the Popular Front, with 378 seats, as
against 220 for the Right and the Centre Right, the so-called ‘national
parties’. Communists (72) and Socialists (149) obtained more than a third
of the votes and accounted for 57 per cent of the new majority. For the
first time, there were more Socialists than Radical Socialists (109); but
when they claimed power, as had happened formerly with Ramsay
MacDonald and the Liberals, the new Socialist-inclined government was
forced to rely on the Radical balance.
The victory of the Popular Front and the presence of a Socialist, Leon
Blum, at the head of the government created a wave of enthusiasm in
the working class, and the hope of an early improvement in its lot. From
26 May strikes broke out spontaneously but in a shape previously un-
known in France, that of the ‘ sit-down strike ’, intended not to pave the
way for nationalisation, as in Italy in 1921, but to foil any attempts at
breaking the strike. The employers opened negotiations with the trade
unions on 5 June which led to the Matignon agreements on the 7th —
higher wages, recognition of trade union rights, obligatory collective
agreements and the reduction of the working week to 40 hours with no
corresponding reduction in earnings. This victory set the seal on half a
century of trade union efforts ; up till now, the great majority of employers
had simply refused to accept the fact that there were trade unions, or to
meet union representatives, to negotiate with them or sign collective
agreements. Fifty-two years after the act that allowed them to be con-
stituted, the trade unions had finally achieved full recognition as the
representatives of the workers, and with this leap forward French social
legislation made up for its previous backwardness in comparison with
that of other industrial countries. The movement ebbed somewhat later,
but agitation continued, especially when the employers had recovered
from their great fear and tried to take their revenge by eliminating the
union representatives and refusing to renew the collective agreements.
Apart from the Matignon agreements and the law on holidays with pay,
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and also the Code de la Famille which, in July 1939, codified all the
measures that had been passed concerning the family — in particular the
obligation on employers to contribute to a ‘caisse de compensation’ for
families (1931) and the principle of equal pay for men and women (1938)
— the social balance-sheet of the decade had been bare.
As it happened, the Popular Front government remained in power for
only one year. A drift to the Right began again in June 1937, and Daladier’s
Radical government in 1938 destroyed the most important of its achieve-
ments. In the long run it must therefore be considered a failure, partly
because it coincided with acts of war bom of repeated aggressions by the
dictators — the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the conquest of Abyssinia,
and especially the Spanish Civil War, in which the ‘farce of non-inter-
vention’ made many left-wing thinkers lose patience with the softness of
the British and French governments. Its failure may also be ascribed to the
fact that its programme had not taken account of economic and technical
difficulties, such as those caused by the delay in the devaluation of the
franc, and the use of out-of-date equipment which made it impossible
for the vast majority of undertakings to conform to the principle of three
eight-hour shifts without excessive costs.
But the main reason for its downfall was the fear and the desire for
revenge felt throughout the ruling class, and the alarm caused by the
spectacular increase in trade union numbers. By the end of 1936, the
C.G.T. numbered over 4,000,000 and the Communist party had doubled
its membership to 380,000 between May and October 1936. Nor was the
ruling class reassured to see a government in power which openly sided
with the workers against the employers, and a prime minister who
remained suspect in their eyes, even though he differentiated between ‘ the
acquisition of power by revolution ’ and ‘ the exercise of power within the
framework of a capitalist society ’ . Added to all this, it must be remembered
that the employers were severely shaken by the sit-down strikes and the
occupying of factories, and by the Matignon agreements which implied
new duties that many small enterprises of a marginal nature were unable
to perform; moreover the fact that their right to be ‘masters in their own
house’ had been contested, that they had been threatened, insulted and
humiliated, had wounded their pride.
This desire for vengeance was apparent in the way the employers re-
organised themselves ; the new Secretary General, C. J. Gignoux, set the
belligerent tone with the Confederation generate du Patronat franqais
which had taken over from the Confederation generate de la Production
frangaise and was now to be joined by a large number of small employers.
There was no increase in output, but rather a deliberate holding back of
production and a general refusal to invest; prices rose and the slowness of
the recovery cancelled out all the advantages that the workers had gained,
and they fell back on strike action. The value of the franc depreciated. In
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June 1937 the senate refused to invest Leon Blum with the full powers he
was asking for, and within eight months three successive governments
were faced with an increasing number of difficulties which included the
Anschluss, a second devaluation of the franc — to 58 per cent of its value
under Poincare — the Munich crisis and the difficulties of trying to imple-
ment the 40-hour week. In November 1938 Daladier suspended the act
prescribing a 40-hour week; the general strike which followed was a
failure because the working class was weakened by internal struggles
between those for and those against the Munich settlement, between
Communists and anti-Communists, between pacifists and those in favour
of resistance to fascism. The division between the two major tendencies
was so deep and the disarray of public opinion such that there followed a
strange reversal of the traditional positions. From 1935 onwards, both
the Left and the Right began to adopt attitudes towards the international
problems which were completely the opposite of those they had formerly
affected (a similar phenomenon appeared, rather less clearly, in England).
The Left, attached to the idea of the League of Nations, to collective
security and to sanctions, placed in the forefront of its concerns the defence
of democracy, which it coupled with that of the nation, since both were
threatened by the fascist intervention in Spain, by the claims of Italy and
by the capitulation at Munich. Except for a very small anti-Communist
section, pacifism was now rejected. The Right, so ferociously anti-
German, hostile to any revision of the peace treaties, to disarmament, to
the League of Nations and to the policy of appeasement, now felt that
the greatest danger was represented by Bolshevism; it turned to pacifism
since a war, even a victorious war, could be nothing other than disastrous,
because Hitler, the bulwark of order, would be defeated. Whilst it still
remained hostile to Germany, the Right attempted to direct Hitler’s
appetite for Lebensraum towards the plains of south-east Europe. The
destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 no doubt opened the eyes
of many to the true nature of Hitlerism, but the unity of France was made
impossible by Daladier’s anti-working-class and anti-Communist policies,
which alienated the greater part of the Left. There existed a sizeable and
highly influential section on the extreme Right which refused to ‘go to
war over Danzig ’. The defence of society was more important than the
defence of the nation.
Political life in Belgium was as disturbed throughout this decade as it
was in France, although not always for the same reasons. There was
considerable governmental instability; proportional representation blunted
the election results and the division of public opinion between the
three parties led to coalition governments. Between 1928 and 1940 there
were thirty governmental crises, frequently two or more a year. The
Socialist party, which had been the great victor of the 1920 election, had
fulfilled its basic programme of universal suffrage, trade union liberty,
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and progressive taxation of incomes and inherited estates. But it drew
back before any real structural reforms and practically abandoned the
socialisation of the means of production and the ‘serment fiscal’ (de-
signed to check fraud and tax evasion), and contented itself with farming
guarantees, holidays with pay for workers and the equalisation of the
basic living wage. The reconstituted Catholic party, strongly influenced
by the Action Frangaise, was divided by working-class conflicts and by the
Flemish question. The Liberal party, more and more tied to business
circles, and committed to the defence of the most traditional sort of
economic Liberalism, was extremely anti-Socialist; it abandoned its anti-
clericalism and, in its social policies, moved ever farther to the right of the
Catholic party. Like the Radicals in France, the Catholic party, a Centre
party, swung sometimes to the Left, sometimes to the Right, and had a
part in all the two-party cabinets. It was only at times of really severe
crisis that a tripartite coalition was formed. The Belgian franc thus found
itself in great difficulties in 1926, with the same results as those noted in
London and Paris. The cabinet was taken over by a businessman, Emile
Francqui, a vice-president of the important Societe generate of Belgium.
He was given full powers and proceeded to limit spending and introduce a
new unit of currency, the belga, worth 5 Belgian francs, which he stabilised
on the American dollar, at 175 francs to the dollar. More notably, the
Socialists were forced to accept the transfer of all railway holdings to the
state, to the Society Nationale des Chemins de Fer, whose shares were used
for the enforced consolidation of Treasury bonds.
When the Great Depression came, it brought with it an even more severe
crisis; the collapse of the rubber and copper markets led to a serious
budgetary deficit and the number of men out of work rose to 300,000.
Once again, the same orthodox treatment was applied: economies,
lowering of the wages of state employees, customs tariff's, new taxes.
The run on gold enabled the government of Theunis, Francqui and Gutt to
return to power — the so-called ‘ Bankers’ government’, which, in pursuing
a deflationary policy, reduced buying power and, in March 1935, aban-
doned parity with gold. The results were similar to those which the same
policies had produced in France. Reaction against ‘bourgeois Conservat-
ism, the Popular Front and Communism’ took two forms: an upsurge
of nationalism in the Flemish area, and of Rexisme in the Walloon area.
The latter was a fascist movement founded by Leon Degrelle, a product of
the Young Catholics in Louvain, who leant heavily for his ideas on the
Action Frangaise ; he denounced Liberal individualism and proposed that
society be reorganised on the basis of the family and the trade guilds. The
1936 election brought heavy defeat to the three traditional parties; the
Liberals lost 41,000 votes and one seat, the Socialists 112,000 votes and
three seats (retaining 70 deputies) but the Catholic party lost 229,000 votes
and three seats, with only 63 deputies in the new parliament. On the other
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hand, the Communists won six seats, the Flemish Nationalists (called
frontistes) eight, and the Rexists, running for the first time, twenty-one
seats, with 271,000 votes. Their electoral success was fleeting, for a few
months later Degrelle, whom the clergy were by now combating, was
beaten in Brussels by Van Zeeland, who won ten times more votes than
him. In 1939, the Rexists held only four seats, although their influence was
to remain strong.
Van Zeeland’s government, which enlisted Henri de Man and Spaak,
both Socialists, secured special powers for twelve months; it used them to
devalue the franc once more (150 Belgian francs to the pound), and then
abandoned free exchange by subscribing to the Oslo agreements, and
adopted a Four-Year Plan. De Man, now the most important figure on
the political stage, began leaning towards Rexisme and speaking of a
national party ‘of order and authority’; he was followed by Spaak, the
first Socialist to become Prime Minister (in 1938). A new economic slump
brought further unemployment and, when capital began to leave the
country, produced a new monetary crisis. Socialist unity was shattered
by the opposition of Vandervelde and Brouckere to Henri de Man and by
the linguistic question. When Pierlot formed his Catholic-Liberal govern-
ment after the 1939 election and abandoned all reform projects and
major public works, the Socialist party passed over to the opposition.
As in France, although they kept their old names, the parties under-
went profound changes. The only party to maintain its unity was the
Liberal party, although it must be added that its membership was now low.
The Socialists were divided into those who favoured orthodox measures,
those in favour of planning, the partisans of Spaak, and those willing to
co-operate with the Communists. Within the ranks of the Catholic party,
there was opposition between the old Right, Christian Democrats,
Boerenbonders, Flemish autonomists, Rexists and ‘frontistes’. The con-
fusion was aggravated by the personal politics of Leopold III, who did not
attempt to conceal his contempt for the politicians and whose behind-the-
scenes political activity earned him the outspoken condemnation of
Pierlot.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR I939~I945
All the liberal democracies of north-western Europe, with the exception of
Great Britain and neutral Sweden, underwent occupation by the enemy.
Alone amongst them to have a government that collaborated with the
Germans was France : all the other governments sought refuge in Great
Britain and carried on the war as best they could. Everywhere the occupy-
ing powers met with stubborn resistance.
Almost the whole of the British people accepted resolutely, from the
very outbreak of the war, the entire gamut of those measures which,
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having been tried out during the Great War, were now reintroduced.
Very wide powers were accorded to the government, new ministries and
departments were created, but the control exercised by parliament was
never interfered with, and the liberty of individual citizens was con-
sequently always upheld. The nation’s economic life was very strictly
controlled in order to avoid the waste of manpower and materials, as well
as to equalise living conditions as much as possible. Universal rationing,
high taxes on unessential goods, the control of wages and of working
conditions — such measures made it possible to maintain national unity in
an atmosphere of goodwill and fraternity to a degree unknown during the
Great War.
Furthermore the Cabinet formed by Winston Churchill in the darkest
days of 1940 included six Labour members of parliament of whom two
were members of the War Cabinet; their presence did not lead to the
passing of any specifically Socialist legislation, but it was a guarantee that
strict control was kept on all the national undertakings including banks
and private enterprise. There was no regular opposition, either in parlia-
ment or in the country as a whole. Both the government and the parliament
were mindful of the need to prepare for post-war reconstruction; one
result was the report of Sir William Beveridge, a comprehensive plan of
social insurance against illness, unemployment and want which laid the
foundations of the future Welfare State.
The Labour party, chastened by past failures — and particularly by
Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘ betrayal’ in 1931 — prepared a realistic programme
of reforms, Let Us Face the Future, placing in the forefront full employ-
ment and limited nationalisation. The somewhat hasty general election of
5 July 1943 found the party ready to defend a concrete programme of
housing and social security which secured the votes of all those who
remembered twenty-five years of insecurity and chronic unemployment.
In spite of the enormous personal prestige of Winston Churchill, the
Labour party won 393 seats (61 per cent of the total number, with 48 per
cent of the total votes), the Conservatives 213, the Liberals 12 and the
Communists 3. For the first time, Labour, with a clear majority, was able
to put its programme into effect.
In France, the national unity created in September 1939 existed in no
more than name. The strong passions that had been at work before the
war had been ill concealed, and when the hammer-blow of invasion and
the debacle came, a great wave of anti-republicanism, eager for revenge,
was let loose. The enemies of the Republic sought consolation in the
suppression of the hated regime, which they held responsible for the defeat.
The old anti-parliamentary feelings became allied to a nationalism as anti-
British as it was anti-German by tradition, and thereby silenced those who
wished to continue the struggle. Intimidated by the violence of the anti-
Republican propaganda, and by their own unpopularity, the deputies and
37
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senators summoned to a National Assembly at Vichy agreed to a proposal,
put forward by Laval, that full legislative and executive powers be accorded
to Marshal Petain, with a blank cheque for the promulgation of a con-
stitution founded on the new trilogy of Travail, Patrie, Famille which, on
io July, replaced Liberte, Egalitd, Fraternite : 80 votes were cast against
the proposition, with 57 abstentions.
There ensued ‘a sudden and anachronistic resurgence of the past’.
Those who were victorious were inspired by the same principles as the
reactionary Right — the outcome of political Catholicism — which now
‘took its revenge for the Dreyfus affair’ and thus attempted to destroy all
that had been achieved since 1789. The leading men of the new regime were
supporters of Maurras, the men who had created the leagues; royalists,
clericals and nationalists; authoritarians won over by fascism and
National Socialism, and by the theories of de Man and Deat; the Catholic
hierarchy, which believed that ‘defeat is a Divine punishment for our anti-
religious laws’, and which was happy with a regime that attempted to put
it in control of education — ‘Petain is France; and France is Petain’, said
Cardinal Gerlier — and senior civil servants glad to be rid of the control of
trade unions and elected representatives. They constituted a very mixed
bag, with interests and tendencies that were far from converging, where
adventurers and Utopians rubbed shoulders with anti-Germans and sup-
porters of the Nazi system. There were thus various rival sorts of Vichy-
ism, which fought and succeeded each other under pressure from the
occupying forces.
There was nevertheless a measure of agreement over a certain number
of principles and aims: suppression of universal suffrage and all forms of
election; all authority was held to emanate from the state personified by
Marshal Petain. The regime was anti-Marxist, but also unfavourable to
capitalism and big industry : its ideal was the small family enterprise ; it called
for a return to the land, ‘which does not tell lies’, it exalted the peasant,
whom it saw as endowed with all the virtues, it founded its beliefs on the
family, the guardian of morality and religion; it was respectful of the
social hierarchy, the traditional defenders of order, the Church, the army
and the upper class. To quote A. Siegfried, ‘ France had never known such
an illiberal and completely arbitrary regime.’ ‘Le delit d’opinion’ was
restored, enforcing political conformity with retroactive effect. Free-
masonry and the political parties were dissolved ; the very title of ‘ Republic ’
disappeared, and the oath to the head of state was reintroduced. It was a
‘regime d’ordre moral’: the Ecoles Normales were suppressed, religious
instruction was brought back into primary education, legislation con-
cerning religious communities was suspended and private schools were
subsidised. The creation of an oppressive department of Political Justice in
1941 led to the detention of Blum, Daladier and Gamelin in a military
fort. The professional groups were organised — agriculture by the Corpora-
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tioti paysanne which was made up of trade unions and agricultural associa-
tions, industry by Committees of Organisation. The Charter of Labour
forbade strikes and lock-outs, and claimed to have suppressed class war-
fare. Anti-Semitic legislation, which drew its inspiration from the Nurem-
berg laws, but which also drew on traditional Catholic nationalism, was
also promulgated.
Alongside this nationalist, Catholic and anti-British Vichy, which pre-
dominated until April 1942, there was the Vichy of Laval, of Damand,
Doriot, Marion, Henriot, Deat, Abel Bonnard, all of them 1 collaborators ’ ;
this was also the Vichy of certain pro-German elements from the worlds
of banking and industry, like Bamaud, of the Banque Worms, and
Lehideux, the son-in-law of Renault. All of these were Fascists and
eager to integrate France into Hitler’s continental system. After having
attempted to be rid of Laval, by having him arrested (the ‘plot’ of
13 December 1940), Marshal Petain tried to govern with the aid of P. E.
Flandin and then of Ad mir al Darlan; but in the end he was forced to re-
call Laval. Thereafter the most important posts were given to men
devoted to the cause of Germany. Economic collaboration grew more and
more important; an anti-Bolshevist legion was set up to fight in Russia.
At the same time the regime took on increasingly the characteristics of a
police state; in 1941, Pucheu formed, from elements of the Legion des
Anciens Combattants created by Petain as a sort of single party, the S.O.L.
(the Service d'Ordre Legionnaire), which was intended for police work;
when Damand became ‘ Secretary-General for the Maintenance of Order
the S.O.L. became veritable storm-troops comparable to the S.S., to be
used in the struggle against democracy and the ‘Jewish lepers’. In
January 1943 the Militia recruited toughs from its ranks who acted as
informers and arrested, tortured and shot Jews and members of the
Resistance and of the Maquis, working with the military courts and the
German police and army.
After the Allied landings in North Africa, the German occupation of the
southern part of France strengthened the position of the collaborators ;
the Germans had no further reason to respect the fiction of an independent
state. From the winter of 1943 on, many extreme collaborators entered the
government, men like Cathala, Abel Bonnard, Bichelonne, Henriot, Deat,
who attempted to maintain those services which the Germans needed in
order to continue to be able to exploit the country. But it was obvious
that the German cause was lost, and the traditionally conservative circles
which had originally supported the National Revolution now became
temporisers, as did the artful and the prudent.
In the other occupied countries the situation was far clearer; there were
never any problems of conscience for the patriotic, who, whilst they
obeyed their own feelings, were also conforming to the orders of their
legitimate government.
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The forms taken by the Resistance movements varied from country to
country and from period to period. In the early days of occupation, the
bourgeoisie and a large section of the middle classes and the peasantry —
as well as the relatively small group of people already favourable to the
Nazi cause — had a feeling of relief that, for them, the war was over and
that the danger of Bolshevism at least had been definitively removed. Then,
little by little, as the humiliation of defeat came to be felt more deeply,
and, above all, as the real nature of the Germans showed itself in their
behaviour, the spirit of the people revived. Men and women of all classes
were roused to opposition by food shortages due to the black market
and requisitioning, by the brutal and perverted police system, by the
persecution of Jews and the execution of hostages, and by the introduction
of forced labour. As the victory at Stalingrad and the Allied landings in
North Africa indicated first a possible, then a probable, and finally a
certain, defeat for the Germans, the local populations passed from de-
featism to passive resistance and then to active resistance. Generally
speaking, however, although the genuine Resistance movements in each
country had the benefit of the sympathy and, at times, of the assistance of
the major part of the population, they were in actual fact composed of a
minority of courageous patriots who were prepared to give up their
livelihood, to undergo torture and deportation, to sacrifice their lives for
their country.
Sweden was the only state to remain neutral ; but her position, between
Germany and the U.S.S.R., was made especially difficult at the time of the
Finnish War and after the fall of Norway and Denmark. Completely
isolated and depending economically wholly on the Reich, she was
forced to make concessions of a military nature, such as allowing the
transit of troops (disguised as soldiers on leave) and material, and the
setting up of secret hiding-places for submarines in Swedish waters. As the
military situation of the Allies improved, Sweden had greater freedom of
action; in 1943 the transit of individual German soldiers only was
allowed, help was given to Danish Jews, and members of the Danish and
Norwegian Resistance were able to train in Swedish camps.
Norway was able to oppose the German invasion for no more than two
months; on 10 June after the evacuation of Narvik, King Haakon VII
and his government withdrew to London. Legitimate resistance went on
under Pascal Berg, the president of the Supreme Court, and Bishop
Berggrav, and put up as much opposition as it could to the installation by
the Germans of a puppet government under Gauleiter Josef Terboven. It
was not until February 1942 that Terboven named Widkun Quisling, the
head of the Norwegian National Socialist party, as leader of a national
government. The response of the Resistance was shown in the resignation
of senior civil servants and the formation of an ‘Inner Front’ which
organised strikes, acts of sabotage (as in the heavy-water factory in 1943)
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and demonstrations against forced labour, which had been introduced in
1941. Milorg, the Military Organisation, under General Ruge, was able
to send agents and information to London and Stockholm, and clandes-
tine publications were distributed in abundance. The Germans, for then-
part, requisitioned all men between 1 8 and 55, closed down the University
of Oslo and arrested 65 of its teachers and 1,500 of its students, and de-
ported and executed members of the Resistance. The final months of
occupation were made particularly difficult by the fact that the Germans
adopted a ‘scorched earth’ policy as they retreated from the Russian
advance and the attacks of Norwegian partisans.
The situation was somewhat different in Denmark, where King Charles X
had remained and ordered all resistance to stop. The policies adopted
by the government of Stauning, a Socialist, and by the Minister of Foreign
Affairs, Scavenius, who favoured close collaboration with the Germans,
went even farther — complete control of the Danish economy by the
Germans, a very unfavourable rate of exchange, the removal of elements
hostile to the new regime, the strengthening of censorship, and collabora-
tion between the police and the magistrates’ courts and the Gestapo. An
election held in March 1943, with the permission of the Germans,
showed how much opposition there was to these measures; Clausen’s
Danish Nazis obtained 2 per cent only of the total votes, and 3 seats,
whereas the government coalition won 143; the Conservative party, the
one most opposed to collaboration, won 40 per cent of the total votes.
Here, too, the Resistance organised acts of sabotage, sending young
people and information to London and Sweden and distributing clandes-
tine publications. The movement became universal with the beginning of
persecution of the Jews ; the king opposed this personally, threatening to
wear the ‘yellow star’ himself; strikes and acts of sabotage followed,
leading to the proclamation of martial law and the arrest of army and
naval officers. A general strike on 30 June 1944 was followed by another in
September, after which the entire Danish police force was deported.
In Holland, where the population was considered to be of pure Germanic
extraction, soon to be integrated into the Greater Reich, a less harsh
regime was in operation, at least at the beginning of the occupation. The
German High Commissioner, Seyss-Inquart, progressively introduced
Nazi institutions and anti-Jewish laws, and dissolved all political parties
and both Chambers. The only party allowed was the Nationaal Socia-
listische Beweging, led by Mussert, with, at the outside, 1 10,000 members.
The sparseness of forests and the density of the population made guerilla
warfare almost impossible, but the democratic spirit, the religious con-
victions and the feelings of fellowship that existed amongst the Dutch
people gave to their resistance certain original characteristics; it was, in
particular, the persecution of the Jews, something that struck deep into
the Dutch conscience, that led to the establishment of a movement which
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organised sabotage and espionage, and gave help to Jews and people on
the run and those evading compulsory service. German repression was also
particularly effective : over a period of two years the German police was
able to arrest a great number of parachutists and seize a large quantity of
material.
Luxemburg was also considered to be an authentically Germanic country
and, step by step, was attached to the Reich under the jurisdiction of the
Gauleiter of Trier and Koblenz. National Socialist laws were brought
into application, the country was incorporated into the Wehrmacht, the
Reichsmark introduced, and the use of the local language, Letzenburgish,
was forbidden. But tenacious resistance was offered in the shape of public
inertia, desertion, clandestine publications, the refusal to deliver requisi-
tioned material and the formation of a Maquis movement in a country
which lent itself effectively to guerilla activities.
In Belgium the king’s refusal to leave the country and his unconditional
capitulation, followed by his decision to regard himself as a prisoner of
war at Laeken Castle and to abstain from all political activity, made the
task of the Germans easier. Public opinion on the whole approved of the
king’s decision. The Germans also found that they were helped con-
siderably by the large, pro-Nazi Flemish Nationalist party, by the
Flemish Rexist party, the V.N.V. ( Vlaamische-Nationaal Verbond), and by
the Walloon Rexists who had now formed the Association of the Friends
of the Greater Reich, the A.G.R.A. Life under the administration of the
military regime was on the whole less difficult than in other occupied
countries. Fairly soon after the Germans began to show sympathy for the
Flemish activists, however, attitudes akin to those displayed during the
occupation in the Great War reappeared. The country underwent ration-
ing, and resistance was encouraged by the Catholic clergy, who never
attempted to hide their condemnation of the collaborators and who
protested against the deportation of workers. Strikes broke out in Liege,
Verviers, La Louviere, Charleroi and Mons ; acts of sabotage and violence
took place, the escape networks organised for Allied prisoners of war and
airmen were very active, and a secret army was formed. Along with the
Belgian Legion, the Front for Liberty and other groups, the largest move-
ment was the Independence Front directed by the Communists. The
country was fairly rapidly liberated and the king, having fallen into dis-
favour after his visit to the Ftihrer at Berchtesgaden in 1940 and his
marriage in 1941, was obliged to leave the country. The regency was put
into the hands of his brother, Prince Charles.
Resistance in France was more difficult to organise, and took a highly
original turn because of the presence on French soil of the government
presided over by Marshal Petain. Loyalty to the head of the army, to a
man universally respected, and the confidence that he inspired in building
up a regime that corresponded to their ideal national state, led men of the
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Right to vest him with a considerable amount of credit and to think that
his way was without doubt the only appropriate way, given the situation.
Many Frenchmen were thus brought to resignation, if not to collabora-
tion. It was not until after the Montoire interview and the announcement
of an actual collaboration policy, with the ensuing recall of Laval, that
many came to think that the way of General de Gaulle, which was the
most honourable, might also be the one most in keeping with the nation’s
interests. The result was that the struggle against the Germans became
identified with the struggle against the Vichy regime. The French eventually
became more or less actively hostile to the Germans and their allies, with
the exception of those who feared that the defeat of the Germans would
also mean the end of the traditional social order.
Resistance was, in fact, chiefly the work of men of the Left, with the
help of some from the Right who were disgusted by the behaviour of the
Germans and their allies from Vichy. Speaking from London on 18 June
1940 General de Gaulle had called on the French to continue fighting
alongside Great Britain and to resist the Germans; ‘France has lost a
battle, but she has not lost the war.’ He thus created an external Resistance,
just at the time when an internal Resistance was spontaneously coming
into being on French soil. It was chiefly due to the B.B.C., which secured
first a French and then a world-wide audience for this unknown general,
that his influence with the internal Resistance grew stronger. The Resist-
ants regrouped, distributed clandestine publications and sent back in-
formation on the Wehrmacht. Establishing contact with them from out-
side was at first difficult. Special envoys sent by the British S.O.E. (Special
Operations Executive) and the B.C.R.A. ( Bureau Central de Renseigne-
ments et d' Action), directed by Colonel Passy, and material, radio trans-
mitters and receivers sent through the same channels enabled the Resist-
ants to co-ordinate their activities, and made it possible for General de
Gaulle’s emissaries to group the various movements round himself. In
northern France, from 1940 onwards, in fact, men determined to resist
had sought each other out and had found the means of contacting their
British allies. Amongst this small number of isolated groups, mostly
ignorant of each other’s existence, the most important were the O.C.M.
{Organisation Civile et Militaire ) made up of military and bourgeois
elements, and Liberation Nord, chiefly composed of Socialists and trade
unionists. In southern France, Combat, directed by a former officer,
F. Frenay, was almost exclusively made up of men of the Left, as was
Liberation Sud founded by E. Astier de la Vigerie, and Franc-Tireur in
the Lyons area. The Communists, either singly or in little groups, had
been circulating clandestine pamphlets since the autumn of 1940; after
the entry of Russia into the war, the party created a National Front and
organised the armed groups known as the Francs Tireurs et Partisans.
General de Gaulle’s envoy, the former Prefect Jean Moulin, succeeded in
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persuading the various movements in the south to join forces; the
Mouvements de la Resistance came into being early in 1942. In the north,
unification occurred later, in May 1943, when representatives of the two
main trade-union movements, the C.G.T. and the Confederation frangaise
des Travailleurs chretiens (C.F.T.C.), six representatives of the political
parties including the Communists, and eight from the various resistance
movements joined together to set up the Conseil National de la Resistance
(C.N.R.), under the presidency of Moulin as de Gaulle’s delegate and
commissioner of the Comite national in London. When Moulin was
arrested, Georges Bidault replaced him. Consequently the whole of the
Resistance was behind General de Gaulle when he set up the Provisional
Government of the French Republic in Algiers (which was composed of
representatives of the political parties, including two Communists, and
members of the resistance movements) and especially when he called a
consultative Assembly.
On the occupation of southern France, the Organisation de Resistance
de VArmee was formed, out of anti-Petain elements of the pre-armistice
army, dissolved by the Germans. The dropping of arms by parachute was
organised after 1943, and escape networks enabled Allied airmen shot
down by the Germans to reach North Africa, as well as volunteers for
the army now being reconstituted there. Scores of intelligence networks
functioned very actively. Attacks on German officers and individual
soldiers multiplied, as did acts of sabotage, for which the Communists
were chiefly responsible; by their intense activity they retaliated against
the deportations and the executions of hostages. But serious misunder-
standings developed between these men, who ignored the counsels of
prudence sent to them, and the French and their allies in London and
Algiers, mostly soldiers by profession, who had no more than a limited
confidence in these spontaneously created groups acting under the orders
of leaders unknown outside France, or else known to be Communists.
These leaders complained that arms were being withheld from them or
else being delivered in insufficient quantities, and alleged that this lack of
confidence was the cause of the failure of certain Maquis operations in the
Ain, the Alps (the plateau of Glieres and the Vercors), the Massif Central
(Mont Mouchet), Correze, Ariege and the Gard.
During the Normandy landings, two French armies took part in the
fighting — the regular army, incorporated into the American army, and the
clandestine army, the F.F.I. {Forces Frangaises de Vlnterieur) who,
according to General Eisenhower, were worth fifteen divisions to the Allies.
The regime established in France after the Liberation was organised
not by the true Resistants, those who fought the Germans in France itself,
but by the men from London and Algiers. They promised to carry out the
programme of the C.N.R., but Left-wing influence was weak amongst
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them. But the leaders of the Right, most of them collaborators and sup-
porters of the Vichy regime, had lost favour; the government was thus
made up of Communists and Socialists, with one new party, the M.R.P.
( Mouvement Republican Populaire ), which drew its inspiration from
Christian Democrat thinking. This party gathered votes from the Right and
thereafter acted as a check on the other parties, in much the same way
as the Radical party had done before 1940.
In Great Britain, the Labour victory — it was only the second time since
1880 that the British Left had won a real victory in a general election —
allowed the party to carry out its programme, which did not go beyond
the framework of the Welfare State. Everywhere, in Scandinavia where
they were in power, and in France and Belgium where they played an
essential part on the political stage, the Socialist parties became reformist,
eager to do their best for a capitalist society, but not to implement
Socialism as their fathers had understood it twenty years earlier. The
discovery of the military might of the Soviet Union, and the extension of
this power into the very heart of Europe, gave rise to feelings of fear. The
close financial and economic dependence on the United States which the
need for reconstruction forced, whether they wished it or not, on the states
of western Europe, could only strengthen the position of those elements
hostile to a Socialist ideology. After the great blood-letting, in spite of
appearances, the social structure of western Europe remained more con-
servative than ever.
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I n the last year of the nineteenth century the American people re-elected
William McKinley as President. By doing so, they ratified the libera-
tion of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine
Islands. Probably not knowing what they were doing, and certainly un-
willing to accept the full implications of their new situation, the American
people had moved out on to the world stage, little better prepared for their
new role than the Japanese had been when Commodore Perry’s ‘black
ships’ broke the centuries-old, self-imposed blockade of the island empire.
William Jennings Bryan, who had fought for the economically un-
fortunate, above all for the angered and impoverished farmer, in 1896,
had fought in 1900 against ‘imperialism’. But the sharp edge of dis-
content had been blunted by the flow of gold from South Africa and the
Yukon, by a natural turn in the trade cycle, and the vague issue of
‘imperialism’ was not an adequate fighting theme. Flushed with an easy
victory over an impotent Spain, and moving into a new boom period, the
American people was convinced that it was living in the best of all possible
republics, that it had nothing and no one to fear.
The politicians who felt this mood had no need to worry about re-
electing the President and some of them took the chance to get out of the
way an obstreperous hero of the brief Spanish-American war, Theodore
Roosevelt, who had won the governorship of New York on the strength
of his achievements with a regiment of irregular cavalry in Cuba. Possibly
against his will, he was nominated for the vice-presidency. In Washington
his great and unused energies were turned, for the moment, to the study
of law. On 6 September 1901 the President was shot by a probably mad
‘anarchist’, Leon Czolgosz, and died on 14 September. Theodore Roose-
velt was President of the United States.
The new President was just under forty-three, the youngest man ever
to enter the White House. He was exceptional in other ways. Bom in
1858, the Civil War was a vague memory for him, not a great crisis lived
through as it had been for every one of his predecessors since Lincoln.
He was the first Republican President since Johnson who was not a
Civil War veteran and, although he was a vehement party man, his
mother’s family were Georgia Democrats and a paternal uncle was, and
remained, a Cleveland Democrat. Not of a rich family by the new stan-
dards, he yet belonged to a stable and prosperous element in New York
society. Graduating from Harvard, he had had a varied experience as
state legislator, as ranch owner, as Police Commissioner, as Civil Service
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Commissioner, as Assistant-Secretary of the Navy. But although active
in politics he was not a politician as McKinley understood the term. He
was the most versatile President since Jefferson and, if much of his know-
ledge was superficial, his interests, curiosity and sympathies were genuinely
wide. His talent for dramatising himself was his greatest gift. His man-
nerisms were the delight of cartoonists and satirists. They were also the
delight of the voters. Almost at once he made the presidency the centre
of the political system as it had not been since Lincoln’s time. He knew
how to manoeuvre, how to conciliate congressional leaders; he did not
quarrel for quarrelling's sake. And, until he was re-nominated and re-
elected in 1904, he avoided a show-down with the conservative elements
who had hoped to bury him in the vice-presidency.
The impress on the American mind made by Theodore Roosevelt was
greater than the positive achievement of his administration. Indeed, that
impress was the main achievement of the administration. He made the
federal government dramatic, impressive, popular. He also made it more
modern. The new President had ideas on nearly all topics. He had plans
for reforming the coinage on Greek models; he revived L’Enfant’s plan
for the development of Washington. He gave jobs to poets and naturalists
as well as to former ‘Rough Riders’. He exposed (with the help of a
celebrated novel. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair) the filth of the Chicago
meat-packing plants. Although far from radical in his economic views,
Roosevelt had none of the automatic sympathy with and admiration for
the businessman that all his predecessors since Johnson, including Cleve-
land, had shared. Thus he intervened in the great Pennsylvania coal strike,
but on the side of the miners. The effectively dramatised presidential
attitude was a novelty in the White House and a welcome novelty. For
the discontent that had exploded and died away in the Bryan campaign
had taken a new and more relevant form. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of
1890 had been a dead letter since the Cleveland administration had failed
to enforce it in a prosecution that, some said, it had not pressed very
effectively. The trusts had certainly flourished. Standard Oil, the best
known and most hated, was stronger than ever and not only did the crea-
tion, in 1901, of the United States Steel Corporation unite all the great
steel producers in one vast combine, but that corporation was capitalised
at $1,400,000,000, just about the total of the national debt. And, as it was
notorious that the assets taken over were not worth this sum, it was
concluded that the promoters, J. P. Morgan and Company, were dis-
counting the future profits of monopoly. When, therefore, the same
banking house arranged peace between the warring Harriman and Hill
railroad interests by the creation of the Northern Securities Company in
1902, public alarm was great and it was a triumph for the administration
when the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the company in 1904,
an election year.
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The Roosevelt administration was marked by the development of two
policies that were, among other things, presidential hobbies. Roosevelt
had spent impressionable years in the west and he was deeply convinced
of the necessity for conservation of natural resources. The policy of with-
holding national lands from mere exploitation went back as far as Cleve-
land, but Roosevelt extended the policy, especially the policy of preserving
the forests, built up the forest service and dramatised the issue with a
success that deeply marked future federal policy.
From his youth, Roosevelt had been fascinated by military affairs and,
although protesting his love of peace, was deeply impressed by the reality
of war. He supported the efforts of his war secretary, Elihu Root, to
reform the army, but nothing could make the United States a great military
power. The navy was another matter. Roosevelt begged, pleaded, argued
for a big navy and he got it; and he watched the development of that navy
with the keenest personal attention. As a gesture for peace through
strength, he sent it on a cruise round the world, with only enough funds
voted to send it half way, thus imposing on a reluctant Congress the duty
of voting the funds to bring it back.
But not all his acts were mere gestures. When he came to office he
reopened negotiations with Britain for a new treaty dealing with the
‘Isthmian Canal’ question. The second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty permitted
the United States to fortify the canal. It was now necessary to decide
between the Panama and Nicaragua routes : Panama was chosen and the
Hay-Herran Convention was negotiated in 1903. But the Colombian
senate refused to ratify the Convention and the canal might have been
held up, or built in Nicaragua, had not a revolution conveniently broken
out in the province of Panama. American recognition was given within
three days and a treaty negotiated between Hay and Bunau-Varilla gave the
United States the right to construct a canal in the territory of the newborn
nation. Later, Roosevelt was to boast that he ‘ took the Canal ’. Although
American complicity in the convenient revolution was never proved, the
episode poisoned the relations of the United States with Latin America
for many years. In other ways Roosevelt wielded what, in one of his
telling phrases, he called ‘the big stick’. He interpreted the Monroe
Doctrine to mean that the United States, if it kept European powers from
using normal coercive measures to secure redress from the fleeting govern-
ments of the turbulent republics of the Caribbean, was bound, in turn,
to impose a minimum of decorum on these republics. Thus the Dominican
Republic was put under American supervision, not by a treaty, but by
an ‘executive agreement’, and Olney’s dictum in the Venezuela dispute,
that the ‘fiat’ of the United States was law, was made to look like the
truth, in this area at least.
Nor were greater issues avoided. The great struggle over the balance of
power in the Pacific that led to the Russo-Japanese War saw American
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official, like unofficial, opinion deeply pro- Japanese. But Roosevelt, acting
the part less of the honest broker than of the candid friend, persuaded the
Japanese, who were, economically at least, at the end of their tether, to
be moderate in their peace terms, and the Treaty of Portsmouth was con-
cluded under American auspices in 1905. The balance of power was
threatened in the Atlantic too, and, although less openly than at Ports-
mouth, Roosevelt supported the Franco-British position at the Algeciras
Conference of 1906. Not since the end of the Napoleonic wars had the
United States been of such importance in world politics ; but then it had
been as a patient, now it was very much as an agent.
There was no doubt (at any rate after the death of Mark Hanna,
McKinley’s manager) that Roosevelt would be re-nominated. The Cleve-
land Democrats capitalised on Bryan’s discomfiture in 1900 and hoped
to capitalise conservative discontent with Roosevelt, by nominating a
conservative and little-known New York judge, Alton B. Parker, but
‘big business’ was not frightened enough of the President to back Parker;
it contributed handsomely (although Roosevelt did not know or preferred
not to know this) to the President’s campaign funds. Parker lost many of
the supporters of Bryan and gained little from the disgruntled Republicans.
The campaign was a great personal triumph and, in the moment of vic-
tory, Roosevelt announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election.
He was the first President in American history to be elected in his own
right after coming to the presidency by mere succession, and he might
have accepted the interpretation of the third term taboo pressed on him —
that it meant two elective terms. But he burnt his boats and, all through
his second term, suffered from the congressional knowledge that he would
be out of office in 1909. His friends hoped and his enemies feared that
he might change his mind, but he was determined to keep his word and
even persuaded himself that a little less than eight years in the White
House was enough for him and the country.
The second term was not sterile. A beginning was made with effective
federal control of railway rates. Relations with Japan, which had rapidly
deteriorated with the disappointment of the Japanese people with the
terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth and with their resentment of anti-
Japanese legislation in California, were nursed back to convalescence,
if not health, by the President and his Secretary of State, Elihu Root.
Work on the Panama Canal was pushed vigorously ahead after a great
deal of initial confusion and squabbling. The President, when he quar-
relled, managed as a rule to get the public on his side. His popular pres-
tige was as great as ever and he was able to choose his successor. He had
considered Root, but Root’s corporation connections were considered
too great a handicap and Roosevelt’s choice fell on his Secretary of War,
the vast William Howard Taft. The Democrats nominated Bryan, who
did much better than Parker, showing where the Democratic strength still
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lay, in the south and west. But the country, seeing in Taft the heir of
Roosevelt, voted for the President in choosing his successor.
The new President had never held an elective office before he entered
the White House. As a federal judge, as Solicitor-General, as Governor-
General of the Philippines, as Secretary of War, Taft had held high but
subordinate office. He was now on his own. And he must have been
conscious that he was only President because Roosevelt had chosen him
as his successor. He began badly by getting rid of the whole Roosevelt
Cabinet. He went on by taking the risk (one never taken by Roosevelt)
of raising the question of tariff revision. The senatorial leaders, who had
smarted under Roosevelt, began to take the measure of his successor
and what they saw reassured them. For Taft believed in the separation
of powers; it was not his function, he thought, to dictate to Congress
or even to lead it. As a result the tariff bill (the Payne-Aldrich bill)
which was finally presented to him was a parody of a revision. Taft
might have stopped it earlier, might have forced modifications, but he
accepted it and defended it. That part of his trade policy which might have
redounded to his credit, the Reciprocity treaty with Canada, was rejected
by Canada. This was not Taft’s fault; if it was anybody’s in the United
States it was the fault of brash Democratic orators like Champ Clark,
now Speaker of the House of Representatives. For the Democrats had
capitalised on Republican disunion and had carried the House for the first
time since 1892. In the House the middle-western insurgents had already
combined with the Democrats to depose the autocratic Speaker Cannon.
Even if the President had been willing to lead Congress, it was too late.
And Roosevelt had returned from Africa and Europe suspicious and soon
to be angry.
The wave of discontent with the old order, with the ‘stand-patters’,
was far from spent. All over the country the voters were looking for a
leader and Taft was not that. He felt, rightly, that he had not betrayed
the trust that Roosevelt had placed in him. He resented warmly the
charge that he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ballinger, had carelessly
or corruptly alienated valuable parts of the public domain. He knew
that his administration had been more active and more successful in
prosecuting the trusts than had Roosevelt’s. But Taft was a man of
judicial temper and of physical and, to some extent, of mental lethargy.
The revolting western radicals would have none of him. For a moment,
it seemed possible that they would rally round Senator Robert Marion La
Follette of Wisconsin, but La Follette could not compete with Roosevelt
as a dramatic figure. And Roosevelt, still young, feeling like ‘a bull
moose’, as he was to say, was under great pressure from his friends and his
temperament to break with Taft. Shooting lions in Africa, visiting kings
and emperors, receiving the Nobel prize for peace, or even giving the
Romanes lecture in Oxford, were not enough for a man of such physical
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and mental energy, still only a little older than Lincoln had been when
he entered the White House. Submitting to both pressures, Roosevelt
became a candidate for the Republican nomination.
It is certain that he was the first choice of the average Republican voter,
and it is probable that he was the only candidate who could have held
the deeply divided party together. But Taft was resolved to fight and with
him was most of the high command of the party, including such close
friends of Roosevelt as Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root. And the
high command were ready to lose with Taft rather than win with Roose-
velt and see the control of the party pass into dangerously radical hands.
A President in office can always secure his re-nomination and Taft did so ;
but Roosevelt and his supporters, protesting that he had been robbed of
the nomination, hastily founded the Progressive party and it nominated
its hero.
This made a Democratic victory certain and, from the politicians’ point
of view, the obvious candidate was the Speaker of the House of Repre-
sentatives, Champ Clark of Missouri. But Bryan, although even he had
come to see that a fourth nomination was almost, perhaps quite, impos-
sible, saw in Clark the nominee and ally of his old conservative enemies,
the people who had nominated Parker in 1904. He threw his strength,
which was still very great, to the only serious rival of Clark, the governor
of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who overtook the Speaker’s early lead
and was nominated.
The Democratic candidate was as unusual a phenomenon in American
politics, in his way, as Roosevelt was in his. He had been in active politics
for only two years when nominated. He had been a distinguished pro-
fessor of political science and a famous President of Princeton University.
He had been a standard southern, conservative Democrat, opposed to
Bryan and Bryanism. But he fought and fought unavailingly to make
Princeton ‘democratic’. He became, to many, a martyr; he also became
impossible as President of Princeton. He accepted the offer of the Demo-
cratic bosses to run for governor of New Jersey and was triumphantly
elected. Again he became a national figure by quarrelling with the bosses,
by defeating them and by advancing increasingly radical views. And it
was as a radical, or at any rate as an advanced liberal, campaigning for
‘the New Freedom’, that he was triumphantly elected.
The new President was a devoted admirer of British constitutional
practice. He saw himself both as President and as Prime Minister. When
he was still President of Princeton University he had written that ‘if he
[the President] led the nation, his party can hardly resist him. His office
is anything he has the capacity and force to make it.’ He practised this
doctrine. He disregarded the precedent set by Jefferson, who was no
orator, and, instead of sending a long, written — and ignored — message to
Congress, he addressed it in person, and Wilson was an orator. He had
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prepared and now pushed through a coherent programme of legislation.
A bill reducing the tariff was introduced and passed by effective and
dramatic appeals to the public and effective public and private pressure
on Congress. The long-debated question of a reformed banking system was
dealt with by the creation of the Federal Reserve System that provided
for a far more elastic currency and a much better organised federal bank-
ing system. It also, in form, gratified the hostility to bankers of the agrarian
radicals, whose leader, Bryan, Wilson prudently made Secretary of State.
He gratified Bryan in other ways: by tolerating, and to some extent
gratifying, his desire to reward the faithful ‘deserving Democrats’ with
patronage and by withdrawing support from the American bankers, who
had been encouraged by the previous administration to meddle in the
already troubled affairs of China. ‘Dollar diplomacy’ was deemed to
be dead. True, Wilson was unlucky. In Mexico a real revolution was
continuing. No Mexican government could carry out the normal obliga-
tions of a sovereign state. Many Americans had very real grievances
against Mexico and Wilson was forced, he thought, to intervene and
occupy Tampico to secure reparation for an insult to the flag. But he
did succeed in getting rid of the ‘usurper’, Huerta, and, by accepting the
mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile, he conciliated Latin-American
opinion. He proclaimed that the Monroe Doctrine was not a form of
protectorate and, although he continued intervention in the Caribbean,
he steadfastly refused full-scale intervention in Mexico, contenting him-
self, in 1916, with sending a punitive expedition after Pancho Villa, who
had raided American territory. The grant of greater autonomy to the
Philippines, like the granting of American citizenship to the inhabi-
tants of Puerto Rico, was proof of the same liberal, anti-imperialistic
attitude.
But the war of 1914, as Wilson feared, pushed him, the longer it lasted,
into the field of foreign affairs for which he was not prepared. It caused
the resignation of Bryan from the Cabinet. The question of the American
attitude to the two sides more and more preoccupied the President and the
public. Legislation was not stopped. Labour unions were exempted (it
was thought) from the anti-trust legislation; a Federal Trade Commission
was set up to control business in the spirit of ‘ the New Freedom’. One of
the most effective critics of big business, Louis Brandeis, was put, after
a bitter fight, on the Supreme Court. The demand of the railway workers
for a federal limitation of hours was granted in the Adamson Act and, at
the end of his first term, Wilson could look back at a record of successful
domestic leadership that few Presidents have ever equalled.
The reunited Republicans nominated Charles Evans Hughes, who re-
signed from the Supreme Court to run. Hughes was a stiff and tactless
candidate and alienated some Progressive supporters he might have won.
But Wilson’s record was his chief asset, not only his domestic record, but
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the belief, summed up in a famous convention speech, that ‘he kept us
out of war’. It was to be an ironical reason for victory.
The Democrats elected their President but barely kept control of Con-
gress. Wilson, once re-elected, attempted to mediate between the warring
powers, but the future of German-American relations was being settled
in Berlin, not in Washington. The German high command decided to
ignore the risk of American intervention which, they decided, would come
too late to be effective and, a month after his second inauguration, Wilson
led the American people into war. Wilson the reformer became Wilson the
war leader. True, the United States was not an ally, only an ‘associated
power’, but Wilson was the chief spokesman to his own people, to the
allied peoples, to the German people, to the Russian people. Necessarily,
the ‘New Freedom’ was neglected and the administration devoted more
and more exclusively to the war. No American war had ever been run
so efficiently, with so few scandals, with such a rapid mobilisation of the
power of what was now the world’s greatest industrial nation. The Ameri-
can people had reason to be grateful, but their gratitude, unlike their
patriotism, was limited. The famous speeches that were heard round the
world, culminating in the ‘ fourteen points’ speech of 8 January 1918, had
more enthusiastic audiences in tormented Europe than in a comparatively
immune America.
The internal impact of the war was, by the standards of the time, very
great. Conscription for service overseas was an unprecedented innova-
tion. So were the economic controls like the imposition of limits on farm
prices, the assumption of a general direction of the railways. The cam-
paigns for the ‘victory loans’ were propaganda efforts unknown even in
the Civil War and they were accompanied by a repression of dissent also
unknown in the Civil War and more severe than anything found in Britain,
France or Germany. The two ‘Espionage Acts’ seemed, to many, a gross
breach of American tradition. German-Americans were the subject of
an imbecile campaign of hostility, and radical dissenters began to suffer
from legal and extra-legal repression. The President, absorbed in the
conduct of the war and inclined to see in criticism and scepticism a
reflection on his own moral purpose, was not as wisely magnanimous as
Lincoln. He was, however, less inclined than Lincoln had been to act on
a vague ‘war power’. He went to Congress for his authority, but equally
refused to countenance anything like the Civil War ‘ Committee on the
Conduct of the War’. The Republican opposition, for the most part, sup-
ported all the war effort zealously; indeed, its most vocal members de-
plored the mildness of the President’s language in his addresses to the
German people and professed fear of a ‘soft peace’. Wilson’s refusal to
give high command in the overseas army to Roosevelt and to Leonard
Wood embittered their numerous Republican friends, and the President
neglected to encourage, by close association with the administration, the
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numerous Republicans who wanted something more than victory. In the
autumn of 1918 victory was in sight. So were the congressional elections
and Wilson was induced to issue an appeal for a Democratic Congress.
It is commonly asserted that this was a mistake. That cannot be proved or
disproved. At any rate, the Republicans carried both houses.
Quite early in the war many Americans had pondered the problem of
a ‘League to Enforce Peace’, and the President was determined to make
that the basis of the new peace treaty. The war had been represented to
the American people simply as a crusade for perpetual peace. That it
might be that, and other things as well, had not been stressed and candid
discussion of war issues was difficult under the regime of the Espionage
Acts. Yet the loss of control of Congress did not shake Wilson’s confidence
in his mandate or his mission. He decided, against the advice of some
close friends, to go to Europe himself. He neglected to take with him any
of the eminent Republicans, like Taft, who might have carried weight in
the party that now controlled Congress. Wilson in Europe was a Messiah
at the very time that he was being disowned at home. For the American
people was demobilising, psychologically as well as materially. The arti-
ficial character of much of the support for the war effort was now made
manifest; so was the folly of imposing conformity. Germans, Irish and
then Italians turned against the administration.
The Republican leadership took full advantage of the change. The new
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge,
packed the committee and led the campaign to impose reservations on the
Covenant of the League of Nations that the President would refuse.
Wilson, finally returning from Europe with a treaty of peace indissolubly
tied up, he thought, with the Covenant, began a speaking tour to re-
convert the country. Without the aid of wireless, Wilson undertook a
task beyond his power and collapsed in Denver. He refused to compro-
mise and any chance of American adherence to the League was over.
It was evident that the tide was turning against the Democrats, that the
referendum that Wilson had called for would be hostile to his great design.
The stroke which the President had suffered kept him from exercising
his functions either as President or as party leader, and a sharp economic
recession in 1920, the election year, further blighted the faint Democratic
hopes. They nominated a former governor of Ohio, James M. Cox, an
able and responsible newspaper owner little known outside his state, and,
as a running mate, gave him the handsome and energetic young Assistant-
Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the far more important
Republican Convention the leading candidates cancelled each other out
and the small senatorial group and some astute party managers imposed
on the tired delegates an empty, idle, Ohio senator, Warren Gamaliel
Harding. The platform was highly ambiguous, and eminent Republicans
who had supported entry into the League could persuade themselves
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that the way to do it was to vote the Republican ticket. The managers of
the campaign knew better. As a last and sole gesture of independence the
convention nominated the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge,
for the vice-presidency. The election was a walkover; the Republicans
carried every state outside the ‘solid South’ and carried Tennessee in it.
The exile of the party that thought that it alone was fit to govern was ended.
So was intrusion into the affairs of other nations. Once in office, any
serious attempt to carry out the vague promises of the platform was
abandoned and instead a separate peace was made with Germany. The
‘great crusade’ was over and disowned.
The years between the inauguration of Harding and the stock market
crash of 24 October 1929 became, in retrospect, one of the least admired
periods in American history, only comparable with the years that followed
the Civil War. Each was a ‘gilded age’. And, because the second era
coincided with a profound change in the folkways of the American people,
affecting domestic life, education, religion, sport, because a whole host of
new forces attacked the older American ways, it was an era far more
disturbed than the era of Grant. It lay between two catastrophic wars,
in an age of change at least as profound as the age of the French Revolu-
tion and Napoleon. It would have been strange if the leaders in politics,
in business, in religion, in education, had all been adequate in the crisis.
Many were not and none were fully adequate. But they suffered a double
condemnation since many of them claimed a competence that it was soon
tragically demonstrated that they did not possess, and the outer world,
on which a majority of the American people had gladly turned its back
in 1920, refused to be excluded, refused to limit its sins and follies to those
which did not affect the United States.
The landslide character of the Harding victory in 1920 was an affirma-
tion of a nostalgia for the safe, stable American past that men thought,
rightly, was threatened. It was a triumph for those sections of the
Republican party which resented the concessions to ‘progressivism’ that
had been forced on the party since the death of President McKinley.
Yet the federal government did not quite go back to the old ways. A
higher degree of control of the railroads was entrusted to the Interstate
Commerce Commission and new obligations were imposed on the railways.
Other instruments of federal control might be emasculated, as was the
Federal Trade Commission; the spirit of the Republican administrations
might be far more friendly to business rights (often disguised as states’
rights) than had been true of the Wilson administration; but federal power
could not but grow, if only because the new industries spreading into
previously rural regions, the greater financial integration produced by the
working of the Federal Reserve banking system, produced a ‘more perfect
union’ that only the doctrinaire could ignore. The mere necessity of servic-
ing the national debt, which had increased nearly twenty-five-fold since
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1914, extended federal power and gave to questions of tax policy a new
intensity of interest. It was possible to pass a temporary and then a per-
manent tariff law (the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922), but this return
to the principles of high protection did not merely, by being enacted,
make the United States again a debtor nation or provide the dollar-
hungry countries of Europe with means of buying American exports,
above all of buying the products of the extension and intensification of
American agricultural production that the war had fostered. Nor was
it possible to limit the effects of the immigration restrictions that cut down
to a trickle what had been a flood, and discriminated (as they were in-
tended to do) against the ‘new immigration’ from eastern and southern
Europe. ‘America’, said President Coolidge, ‘must be kept American.’
That was also the view of less eminent persons. In the south there was
a revival of the Ku-Klux-Klan. It was not, for long, confined to the
southern states, although it tended, in the north, to be strongest in states
like Indiana with a strong southern element in the population. Nor was
its sole enemy the Negro. Its members had to be ‘white, Gentile, Pro-
testants’. It enforced the standards of fundamentalist Protestant morality
by whipping, branding, castration, murder.
The uneasiness that led to the creation of the new Ku-Klux-Klan found
other manifestations. It inspired legislation against the teaching of Dar-
winian evolutionary theory in the schools of several states; it inspired
violent controversies within Protestant churches in which ‘fundamental-
ists’ (the term dates from this time) fought ‘modernists’.
Politically, the most important achievement of this defence of the old
American standards was the adoption of the eighteenth amendment to
the Constitution in 1919. It provided not for the extension of the powers
of Congress over the liquor traffic, but for the prohibition of ‘ the manu-
facture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importa-
tion thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and
all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof’. It also provided that ‘the
Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce
this article by appropriate legislation’. All states but Connecticut and
Rhode Island finally ratified the amendment. Many states began by
passing legislation reinforcing the main federal law, the ‘Volstead Act’,
but zeal evaporated as it was discovered that mere law had very serious
limits. Within a few years the administration of prohibition legislation,
then the whole question of the wisdom and efficacy of the amendment,
were one of the two or three burning themes of politics and one of the
most significant lines of division between the old America and the new:
the America of the countryside and the small towns, mainly north Euro-
pean in origin and Protestant in religion; and the America of the great
new urban centres, where most of the population was of fairly recent
immigrant stock, Catholic or Jewish in religion, and, in ways of life,
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ignoring some of the most cherished traditions and prejudices of the
countryside.
Behind the fears for the American way of life lay equally potent dis-
content with some aspects of that life. The artificial markets created by
the war had led to a fantastic overestimate of the permanent demand for
American foodstuffs and raw materials like cotton. The prices of land
soared as these expectations were discounted. Arable settlement moved
in the war years and immediately afterwards into areas unsuited for
ploughing except in exceptionally favourable seasons. Money was bor-
rowed to buy land, to pay for improvements, to build schools and roads.
The slump of 1920 wiped out many hundreds of millions of investments,
turned many owners into tenants, wrecked the hopes of becoming owners
of many more and left all the western and some of the southern states
with a permanent grievance. They alone were not sharing in the golden
stream that was flowing so freely in other regions. An alliance between
the representatives and senators of both parties, the ‘ farm bloc ’, weakened
party discipline. Behind and below the formal Republican triumphs there
was this pool of discontent. And no Republican administration com-
mitted to the ethos of business could give the farmers what they wanted :
some real, tangible, cash equivalent of the benefits flowing to industry
from high tariffs. The new Republican administration had good fortune
in its first year or two. The business recession of 1920 passed away and
what was, with some minor lapses, an unprecedented boom began. The
great American mass production automobile industry, personified by
Henry Ford, was the delight of Americans and the wonder and envy of the
world. Poverty was boldly asserted to be disappearing; the immense
wealth produced by business was lavishly if not equally distributed.
Even the outside world seemed, for a moment, to be returning to sanity
and solvency. The American government carefully avoided all commit-
ments in Europe or Asia, but the two ‘ settlements ’ of the German repara-
tions question were made under American auspices: the Dawes plan in
1924, the Young plan in 1929. The American government denied any
moral or legal connection between the reparations debts owed by Germany
to Britain, France, Italy and the debts these countries owed America, but
the funds with which Germany paid the victors were provided by the
American private investor and, in turn, were in the main paid over to the
American government as part of the war-debt settlements negotiated in
these years ; settlements that, admitting the desirability of such payments,
were in the presumed economic state of Europe generous — a view more
strongly held in America than in Europe. In the Far East the Washington
Treaty of 1922 which settled, for the time being, the ratio of naval power
seemed, to the optimistic, to deal adequately with the situation created by
the absence of Russian power, the decline of British and French power, the
chronic civil war in China and the temptations that this situation offered
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to an economically expanding but hard-pressed Japan. Even when the
stability of this settlement was open to more and more doubt, the Kellogg
Pact of 1928, in which all the great powers, except Russia, renounced
‘recourse to war. . .as an instrument of national policy’, seemed to a
legalistically minded people to mean the end of the threat of a renewal of
the follies of 1914-18. It also made the disputes over armament conven-
tions more unintelligible, more easily explicable in terms of the crude
interests of bankers and munition makers. The discomfited Democrats
themselves abandoned the cause of the League of Nations. And it was
significant that, despite support from every President right down to the
outbreak of the second world war, all attempts to get the United States
to join the World Court broke down in the Senate.
Good fortune also attended the Republicans in a grim form, for the
death of President Harding in 1923 relieved them of a burden that might
have been fatal to their chances in 1924. Harding, if not quite as unfit to
be President as criticism after his death alleged, and slowly learning his
trade, yet had no serious executive or legislative experience and, if not so
much a dupe of his corrupt friends as they suggested, was yet too tolerant
of small-town grafters like his Attorney-General, Harry Daugherty, and
men of desperate fortunes like Secretary of the Interior Fall. Soon
rumours and then more than rumours of corruption began to spread. And
they were rumours of corruption on a great scale, of corruption abetted
by the Attorney-General and the Secretary of the Interior as well as
corruption affecting lesser federal officers. Harding died before the
storm broke. The Senate investigated scandals connected with the aliena-
tion of federal oil lands, with the administration of the Department of
Justice, with the Veterans Administration. The evidence was abundant and
conclusive : there had been no such plundering of the public assets since
Grant’s time. The new President hesitated but gave way. Three cabinet
officers resigned ; one was later imprisoned ; the new administration cleaned
house and the evil was interred with the bones of Harding.
The new President, Calvin Coolidge, was of a very different type from
the lush orator and small-town editor who had been foisted on the Ameri-
can people. He was a dry, Yankee lawyer, with experience of administra-
tion as mayor of Northampton and governor of Massachusetts and with
a record of party regularity that had not involved him in being the dupe
or accomplice of politicians like Harry Daugherty or Albert Fall. He
gave to the White House, in an age of dissolving standards, a reassuring
air of Yankee thrift, caution and taciturnity. The Republicans soon noticed
that their new President was an asset and all the resources of publicity
were devoted to building him up.
Inside the Democratic party the feud between city and country, the
old and the new, took dramatic and suicidal form. The two chief candi-
dates for the nomination in 1924 were William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s
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Secretary of the Treasury (and son-in-law), and Alfred Emmanuel Smith,
who was serving his second term as the phenomenally popular governor
of New York. One was the candidate of the rural, evangelical, ‘dry’
sections of the party, the candidate favoured by William Jennings Bryan;
the other was of Catholic Irish origin, a son of Tammany Hall, a ‘wet’,
most manifestly a child of the ‘sidewalks of New York’. The partisans
of the two wrecked the convention and the chances of the Democratic
party. The nominee, chosen almost in despair, was an eminent corpora-
tion lawyer, John W. Davis, who campaigned on the issue of corruption.
It was not only that the issue was not very effective in a boom year, but
a great part of the radical discontent of the country was drawn off to sup-
port the ‘Progressive’ candidacy of Robert Marion La Follette, the
famous radical senator. In these circumstances, the victory of the Re-
publicans was inevitable.
Coolidge, as much as Walpole, wanted to let sleeping dogs lie. The busi-
ness boom continued and the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover,
both encouraged the rationalisation of internal business, the standardisation
of technical and of commercial practice, and encouraged American busi-
ness to look abroad for ever-expanding markets. There were dark patches.
The textile towns of New England were harder and harder hit by southern
competition. Many coalfields faced crippling competition from fields
either newer or easier to run because the miners’ unions were weak or
absent. The hopes of an expansion of organised labour that had risen high
in the war were seen to be baseless. The unions barely held their own. In
some areas they did not do even that. The radical forces that had rallied
round La Follette were disorganised and demoralised. Communist zea-
lots were active in fomenting strikes, in starting rival unions, in all kinds
of agitation and propaganda, but what was the use in a country like the
America of Coolidge?
As the presidential campaign of 1928 approached, there was only one
doubt in the minds of the observers: would President Coolidge rim? In
an ambiguous statement he conveyed that he would not and that made
it certain that the two candidates would be Herbert Hoover, the success-
ful personification of the businessman in politics, and ‘AT Smith, now
serving his fourth term as governor of New York. They were duly nomi-
nated and the campaign was of more significance than it seemed. For
the nomination of a Catholic brought into the open the forces that had
hidden behind the Ku-Klux-Klan. In no campaign in modem times had
word-of-mouth slander played a greater part. And, with one important
exception, in no campaign in modem times had the two candidates been
closer in their programmes. Each asked for a mandate to carry on the
business of the United States as it was being carried on. The one exception
was that Governor Smith was hostile to the zeal with which, formally at
least, the federal government was enforcing prohibition, while to Secretary
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Hoover it was ‘ a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive
and far-reaching in purpose’.
Again, there was little doubt of the issue. Prosperity was too widely
spread, the ‘golden expectation’ of an even more rapid increase in wealth
and in general well-being too generally shared, for an opposition candi-
date, even if he had not been a Catholic, Tammany New Yorker, to
defeat the party that had wrought so well. And formally the Democratic
party did worse than ever before, even losing five states of the solid south.
But some observers noted that Smith got more votes than any Democrat
had ever got, that he carried Massachusetts and Rhode Island and that
everywhere in the great cities he showed a strength that no Democratic
candidate had known for a generation. But the business candidate was
elected and prepared to lead a business civilisation to greater heights.
In less than six months the bubble burst. It is possible that earlier ‘ panics ’
were as severe as that which began with the break in the New York
Stock Exchange. Earlier panics, too, had had marked political results. But
the ‘Depression’ of 1929 which lasted, in one form or another, though
with diminishing severity, until 1940 was more revolutionary in its
impact than the previous ‘panics’ had been. It produced changes in
American political and economic life as important as those produced by
the Civil War, and more important than American intervention in the
first world war or possibly even in the second.
In the first place, it accelerated developments in American govern-
mental functions and in state and federal relations that would no doubt
have come anyway. Isolationism had taken more forms than the drawing
of American skirts away from Europe. It had been based on a belief that,
inside America as well as outside it, dangers threatened the American way,
dangers of state intervention in favour of labour, dangers of rudimentary
state socialism, dangers of the use of the taxing power to redistribute
income in accordance with some idea of social justice. It was not acciden-
tal or insignificant that the unions started and controlled by the great
corporations should have been dubbed by the sponsors ‘the American
plan’. The same forces that produced political support for prohibition,
for immigration restriction, that produced laws against ‘radicalism’, were
at work in saving the United States from the contagious example of
Europe. But, seen over a longer perspective, the forces, social and political,
that were at work in the presidencies of the first Roosevelt and of Taft
and during the first term of Wilson were only stayed, not stopped. They
were stayed because the Republicans and their business allies claimed,
plausibly, to be the natural, beneficent and successful leaders of the
American people. ‘The business of the United States is business’, said
Coolidge in an unguarded moment, but, taken out of its context as it was,
the phrase did represent what most Americans thought. It was discovered,
between 1929 and 1933, that the business leaders did not understand or
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could not control the great economic machine that they had claimed to
have made and to know how to operate with more and more skill.
The inevitable result of the depression was to weaken, then to destroy
faith in, the business class as a ruling class. Even as far as it was merely
a matter of liquidation of speculation, it was serious enough and faith-
destroying enough. Millions had been encouraged to speculate — in Ger-
man securities, in Latin-American securities, in many much-touted
American securities — and these investments proved of no more permanent
value than losing tickets at a race meeting. Nor had most of these
securities been marketed by fly-by-night entrepreneurs (although there
were enough of them), but by great banks and by great bankers. Even
had there been no more speculation, the credit structure was top-heavy.
The long farm depression had, for years before the crash, been putting a
strain not only on local banks, which failed in thousands, but on insurance
companies, on loan companies, on holders of farm mortgages. The rail-
roads were not in good shape, and even when well managed (and not all
were) were under the strain of competition from the automobile, car and
truck alike. As pressure continued, as banks insisted on payment of
loans, as brokerage houses insisted on payment of margins, as money was
lost in ‘safe’ banks and ‘safe’ securities, cautious and secure citizens
found themselves as badly off as the mere gamblers. And, as scandal
after scandal was revealed; as it was learned how the tax laws made it
easy and legal for the rich-and-well-advised to avoid payment of income
tax; as it was learned how the markets had been rigged; as towering
pyramids of cards like the Insull utilities ‘empire’, or the less scandalous
but equally insolvent Van Sweringen railroad ‘empire’ collapsed, dis-
content and distrust swelled into fear and anger. The American people,
or many millions of them, had been betrayed by their natural leaders, so
they turned to other leaders.
It was possibly unjust that this loss of faith should have been most
visible in the change of the popular attitude to the new President. Her-
bert Hoover’s reputation for ability, probity, industry, special competence,
was not fictitious. But he had not only to deal with a world crisis, he
had to deal with a domestic crisis for which his party, if not himself, was
in part to blame, by its tariff policy, by its blind faith in the wisdom and
trustworthiness of big business, by its illusion that the outer world could
be ignored. Thus the only Republican answer to the crisis in America’s
balance of payments was to raise the tariff yet higher in the Smoot-Hawley
Act of 1930, a piece of monstrously ill-timed legislation. Many were
willing to believe that the two congressional authors of the Act did not
know what they were doing, but could not believe that the President, the
former energetic Secretary of Commerce, who had so pushed external
trade, did not know it. Whether positive American co-operation in
liquidating the war debts, reparations and the whole tangled web of
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inextricable financial deals made in the boom years would have saved
Europe from the final crash no one knows. But the President could not
do more than offer a temporary moratorium. Congress and public opinion
would not let him do more. And, even if it was true, in part, that America’s
troubles came from Europe, the American people had been taught for
over a decade to disregard the powers for mischief of the outside world.
It was too late to blame Europe now. The administration was blamed
instead.
It was blamed for many things, for some of which it had no responsi-
bility. It may be doubted whether any administration would have dared
rigorously to limit the supply of money for speculative financing, thus
bringing an end to a boom that most Americans expected to last and
whose cessation they would have blamed on the politicians, not on the
bankers and businessmen. Believing at first that the collapse of the
market was merely a market collapse, a healthy shaking out of speculators,
the Hoover administration placed too much faith in faith, in reassuring
messages, in prophecies of speedy recovery ‘just around the comer’. And
there were, in 1930, short periods of recovery, short periods of minor
booms, and the congressional elections of that year were less disastrous
than had been feared. The Republicans just lost the House and just held
the Senate.
It was in the second half of President Hoover’s term that the rot set in.
It set in because, as the depression stayed and deepened, the problem of
what to do about it became the main theme of politics and one that
brought out sectional, party and class differences. After a decade of
budget surpluses there was a series of deficits. How were they to be met, by
higher income taxes, by closing the gaps revealed in the existing tax laws
or, in part, by a sales tax? A revolt of Democrats and insurgent Republi-
cans defeated the sales tax in the House of Representatives. The insol-
vency of many railways, the threatened insolvency of many banks and
the many disastrous bank failures, the drying up of local credit, left the
federal government no choice but the underwriting of the credit structure.
One instrument of that underwriting was the creation of the Reconstruc-
tion Finance Corporation. But, for the insurgent members of Congress,
the theory behind the new corporation was exactly what the country had
been wrecked on. It was the theory of wealth and well-being percolating
down from above. They wanted aid for the unemployed to be provided
by the federal government, aid provided for bankrupt municipalities and
for states whose tax resources were drying up. Poverty was no respecter
of state lines and some of the poorest states had the most poor. It was
not until 1932 that the barriers the Hoover administration had set up
against ‘raids on the treasury’ began to go down. It was noted, bitterly,
that they did not go down until the depression had finally reached the
possessing classes. For the great corporations which had cut wages and
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dismissed workers also maintained dividends, dividends not earned and
not necessarily spent when received. The owners of tax-free securities
(which successive Secretaries of the Treasury had tried to have abolished)
still drew their interest, while all public services were cut — libraries,
schools, roads, even prisons suffered from a wave of drastic economy that
was thought, by many ‘ responsible ’ people, to be the drastic cure for the
economic disease.
But not all voters or politicians were ‘responsible’. A few listened to the
heretical theories of John Maynard Keynes; others revived the old infla-
tionary panaceas; the veterans, or most of them, wanted to be paid a
bonus, now. Thousands of the veterans descended on Washington; the
‘bonus army’ was like Coxey’s army of 1894. The veterans were finally
expelled from their camp by troops using gas bombs. It was the equiva-
lent of Cleveland’s use of troops to break the Pullman strike in 1894. But
it got far less applause and was one of the many burdens the administra-
tion had to bear in an election year.
Despite all the activity of Communists, of Socialists, of radicals of all
types, it was to the regular opposition that the voters were turning. The
Democratic nominee would be elected ; the only question was his identity.
The obvious candidate was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt had
been elected governor of New York in 1928 when his chief, A 1 Smith,
failed to carry his own state. He was re-elected in 1930 with the greatest
majority in the state’s history. He was the most ‘available’ candidate and,
despite bitter opposition, he was nominated and broke all tradition by
flying at once to the Convention and accepting the nomination on the spot.
This disregard of tradition gave a welcome impression of energy and gave
proof that the infantile paralysis from which the candidate suffered had
not destroyed his energy. The Democratic platform, above all its double
promise of a reduction in federal expenditure and support for the repeal
of prohibition, won millions of voters away from the Republicans; for,
to add yet another millstone to their burden, the Republicans had hedged
about the fate of what the public insisted, wrongly, that the President had
called ‘the noble experiment’. Roosevelt carried forty-two states, in-
cluding all the large states save Pennsylvania. The Democrats swept both
houses of Congress and nearly all state offices and state legislatures.
There was a mandate to do something, but there was then an interval
of four months between the election and the inauguration of the new
President. President Hoover stubbornly stuck to his policies, above all
to measures designed to keep the dollar on gold. The President-elect,
equally firmly, refused to underwrite the policies of the repudiated admini-
stration and party. The world situation grew worse. Hitler took power in
Germany; an assassin almost succeeded in killing Roosevelt in Florida.
The long-promised revival of business was postponed again because, said the
Republicans, uncertainty about the policies of the new administration
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destroyed confidence. But that had been destroyed at least a year
before.
The crisis that the new administration had to deal with had only been
equalled, if ever, by the crisis that faced Lincoln in March and April 1861.
Three years of deepening economic distress had undercut the foundations
of many once strong and respected institutions. Few governmental units,
cities, counties, states, were solvent. Social institutions designed for a
rural society, charitable institutions designed for minor economic cata-
strophes or personal disasters, had had to face an ever-increasing strain.
Under that strain they were breaking and what threatened to become an
unmanageable mass of misery was poised like an avalanche. Social habits
which had made for stability and discipline had been worn down. The
‘bonus marchers’ in Washington had been, for the timorous, only the
precursors of the storm. If the angered veterans, if the desperate un-
employed once began to move en masse, what could the local authorities,
often bankrupt, with their reduced police forces, with their sullen citizens
all around them, do? What meaning in this context had the traditional
slogans of Americanism, the traditional precepts of self-help, of thrift, of
sturdy independence? Indeed, the wonder was not that these attitudes were
wearing out, but that they had lasted so long. The winter’s discontent
faced the new administration, and its situation was made dramatic, and
the need for a dramatic solution made evident, by the collapse of the
banking system. Banks had failed in increasing numbers: little country
banks, great city banks. But now the machinery of banking and credit
was grinding to a stop. More and more bank holidays were proclaimed
until, on the eve of the inauguration, banks were closed in forty-seven
states. And one of the first acts of the new President was to close all
banks in the United States by presidential proclamation. Congress hastily
ratified this action; no banks could be reopened except by permission
of the federal government. The federal reserve banks were reopened
first, then the solvent private banks. The first shock of the crisis had
been met.
It is impossible to understand the ‘New Deal’ without bearing in mind
the character of the crisis with which the new administration was faced.
In his inaugural address, Roosevelt had said that there was ‘nothing to
fear but fear itself’. But the old sources of faith, trust in the regular way
of doing things, in the businessman as the natural custodian of the govern-
mental machinery — all these supports to faith had gone. They had to be
replaced by new faith, faith in new ways of doing things, faith in the
energy and audacity of the new administration. That faith was given
abundantly and uncritically; it was near-treason to be critical. Franklin D.
Roosevelt began his administration with a greater share of the confidence
of his countrymen, especially but not exclusively of his electors, than any
President had ever had, except possibly Jackson, Grant and Hoover.
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The first months of the New Deal came to be known in retrospect as
‘the Hundred Days’. But it was not a hundred days ending in Waterloo,
but a hundred days ending in a feeling of hope and energy that the Ameri-
can people had not known since 1930. Again, in immediate retrospect,
the period seemed to be completely dominated by the leadership of the
new President; it was dominated by him, but not completely. He had
been nominated by a coalition of the west and south, the same coalition
that had nominated Wilson in 1912 and re-elected him in 1916. And that
coalition still hankered after the old remedies, above all inflation by the
use of silver or the issue of paper currency. The banking policy of the new
administration was thus, in part, forced on it by the knowledge of the
strength of the inflationary forces, by the knowledge that ‘ sound banking
practice’ meant for many, perhaps most Americans in 1933, an ingenious
system of robbery. So the sprawling banking system was left unrational-
ised, for, although many hundreds of banks never reopened, the local
banking system remained unaltered. The one great change was the imposi-
tion of a system of federal guarantee of deposits (at that time up to $5,000),
a measure that shocked the orthodox, but which was essential if restora-
tion of faith in banking and the restoration of the credit structure were
to be possible. In the same way, the embittered fanners had to be given
something tangible. The ‘revolving funds’, the marketing schemes with
which the Republicans had attempted to cure the earthquake that was
threatening to bring the rural credit structure down and which threatened
to produce something like a jacquerie, were swept aside. Farmers were
to be paid not to produce the excessively abundant crops which were
driving down the prices below the bankruptcy level and the A.A.A.
(Agricultural Adjustment Administration) came into being. In the field
of industry, a corresponding effort was made to put an end to the much
denounced evils of ‘ cut-throat competition’. This effort took shape in the
most controversial experiment of the first New Deal, N.R.A. (the National
Recovery Administration). N.R.A. lumped together, in a hastily and
badly drafted statute, a number of remedies not necessarily consistent
with one another. Like some other legislation of this time, it was in part
designed to head off more radical measures, such as the Black-Connery
bill that proposed to spread employment by imposing a thirty-hour week.
Originally N.R.A. was to provide public works (carrying farther a remedy
tried by the Hoover Administration); its functions included the relief
of agriculture. But, by the time the law was enacted, these two fields of
action had been allotted to others. The device by which the N.R.A.
became best known, the ‘ codes of fair competition ’, were, again, originally
planned only for the great, well-organised industries. But every type of
business insisted on sharing in the guarantees against ‘unfair competition’.
Labour, too, wanted its share in guaranteed wages, in limitation of hours,
in recognition of the sickly trade unions. Even the consumer was to be
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represented and protected. N.R.A. was launched under General Hugh A.
Johnson with all the publicity that had been used for the ‘ Victory Loans ’. The
emblem of the ‘ Blue Eagle’ was sported by great businesses and little. And
since one object of N.R.A. was the raising of prices, people bought against
the anticipated rise and caused a reversal of the long, downward spiral.
It was not only that this precautionary buying came to an end in a few
months, but that not all firms played up, notably the great and, until
recently, sacred firm of Henry Ford. Many minor businesses which had
gladly sported the ‘Blue Eagle’ now began to repent it. Evasion of its
obligations became more and more common, the hastily drawn-up codes
were harder and harder to enforce. Labour, too, found that employment
did not noticeably increase, and where it did it was not obvious that the
codes deserved the credit. And the protection given to the unions, in the
Act and in the codes, turned out to be illusory. By the time that the
Supreme Court unanimously condemned the original act in Schechter
Poultry Corporation v. The United States (1935) N.R.A. was already mori-
bund. Few regretted its death except the President, and his public regrets
may not have represented his real thoughts.
In other ways, the new administration turned its back on the policy
of its immediate predecessor. That the new administration would tamper
with the currency had been a resented Republican charge. But it promptly
did so; the United States went off gold and the President ‘torpedoed’ the
London economic conference by his refusal to discuss stabilisation, a
decision that put further severe pressure on the remaining gold-standard
countries, notably France, and acted both as a tariff barrier to European
imports and a bonus to American exports. The new currency policy, if
it horrified the orthodox, gratified that much more numerous group, the
creditors, who had seen their real obligations rise steadily since 1929
(see ch. m). The foreign economic policy of the new administration,
indeed its whole foreign policy in this period, was what came to be called
‘isolationist’. The new Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was a fervent
Wilsonian, a believer in low tariffs and in international co-operation but,
as yet, he had not the ear of the President.
The American people had discovered how little paper barriers to aggres-
sion meant when Japan destroyed the last remnants of Chinese authority
in Manchuria over the heated protests of President Hoover’s Secretary
of State, Henry L. Simson, not backed up, even verbally, with any warmth
by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon. The temper of the people
was revealed in the Johnson Act of 1934, which forbade all credits to
countries which had defaulted in payments on their war-debts to the
United States. A special Senate committee, headed by Senator Nye,
seemed to the uncritical to prove that one of the main causes of war was
the selfish interest of bankers and munitions makers, the ‘ merchants of
death’. A series of ‘Neutrality Acts’ prohibited trade in arms or the
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extension of credit to belligerents. The administration resisted, as far
as it could, attempts to limit executive discretion, but it had to accept
legislation designed, as was later said, to ‘ keep the United States out of the
war of 1914’.
A more positive policy was inherited from the Republicans in the Latin-
American field. A series of Mexican revolutions had further complicated
the problems that plagued and perplexed Wilson. Confiscation of Ameri-
can property was answered by vehement demands for redress, to be
obtained by force if necessary. The worst of the tension with Mexico
was ended by Coolidge’s ambassador, Dwight Morrow, although a formal
settlement of American claims was not completed until 1942. Interven-
tion in the Caribbean republics was ended (except in Haiti) and $25,000,000
was paid to Colombia in 1921 for unspecified losses, which meant the
damage done by American policy at the time of the Panama ‘revolution’.
The Roosevelt administration carried farther the ‘ good neighbour’ policy.
After a revolution in Cuba, it consented to an abrogation of the Platt
amendment of 1901 authorising American intervention to preserve order
in the newly liberated republic. Haiti was evacuated and Pan-American
conferences were used by Secretary Hull to build up a policy of ‘ hemi-
spheric solidarity’. In the Philippines, where the Wilson policy of self-
government had been to a large extent reversed by the Harding administra-
tion, the Roosevelt administration moved towards complete independence
(a movement made easier by American pressure-groups hostile to com-
petition of Philippine products inside the American customs barriers).
The Commonwealth of the Philippines was created and it achieved
complete independence in 1946.
Next to the bankers in public disesteem were the great power com-
panies, and it was easy to get through Congress a measure, vetoed by
several Republican presidents in a simpler form, for using federal instal-
lations of the late war at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River to produce
power. But the Tennessee Valley Authority had more to do than improve
navigation and, as an ostensible side line, produce power. The whole
valley was to be rehabilitated by a government corporation, secured from
political interference, with a broad commission to promote the general
welfare of an especially backward region where the normal motives of
capitalist development did not work. Attacked in the courts and shaken
by internal feuds, the T.V.A. survived and throve, becoming one of the
showpieces of the administration.
There were other new federal organisations created, like the Securities
and Exchange Commission invented to police the stock markets. The
powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission and of the Reconstruc-
tion Finance Corporation were extended. The foundations were laid of
systems of unemployment insurance, administered by the states but
largely financed by the federal government. The practice of ‘ grants in aid ’
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was not new, but it was now vastly extended; children, widows, the
unemployed, the blind, benefited. Behind the often inefficient and often
bankrupt local units stood the federal government. Promises of cutting
down federal expenditure, which had led to actual cuts in salaries and
payments to veterans in the first few months of the new administration,
were forgotten by the administration and remembered by its enemies;
such enemies, including eminent Democrats like A 1 Smith, as those who
founded the ‘Liberty League’. But the tide was running one way. At the
mid-term elections of 1934 the administration scored an unprecedented
triumph: it increased its majorities in both houses. Republican chances
were dim for 1936. Nor were they made brighter by the action of the
Supreme Court in killing not only the unregretted N.R.A., but the A.A.A.
and other social legislation. The conservatism of the majority of the
Supreme Court had long been a source of resentment in the breasts of
those who wished to use state or federal power to reduce economic
inequality and temper the harshness of competition. The court seemed
determined to prevent either the states or the Union from legislating in
fields long occupied by European governments.
The Republican nomination in 1936 was not much worth having. It
went to one of the few Republican politicians who had survived the deluge,
Alfred M. Landon, the governor of Kansas. Landon was an old Progres-
sive of 1912 with a good local record, but he was a bad speaker and he
had bad luck. A terrible drought in 1934 was followed by an equally
severe drought in 1936; the farmers were in no mood to hear sermons
on government extravagance or states’ rights. An overwhelming majority
of the press, of business leaders, of sound, conservative opinion was against
the President but, when the results were in, he had carried every state but
Maine and Vermont, with a percentage of the popular vote only exceeded
by Harding’s in 1920. And in Congress the Republicans were further
reduced until they found it difficult to do their share of the manning of
committees.
The American people more definitely than in 1932 had given a commis-
sion to Franklin D. Roosevelt to reform the Republic. How would he
interpret it? On 4 February 1937 the Democratic leaders in Congress were
told: the ‘court bill’ was shown to them. It purported to be a bill for
the general reform of the federal court system and many of the reforms were
overdue. But the gist of the bill was a provision allowing the President
to appoint not more than six new justices of the Supreme Court for every
justice of seventy and over who had served ten years and did not retire;
or, as its enemies put it, it was a bill to ‘pack the Supreme Court’. It was
bitterly fought; the Republicans wisely left the fight to revolting Demo-
crats and it was discovered that, even after the election of 1936, there were
institutions that the American people still treasured, no matter how
bitterly they criticised them.
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The threat to the court came, too, at a moment when moderate public
opinion was alarmed by the wave of ‘sit-down strikes’ that had marked
the great drive to create effective trade unions in the mass industries.
This had been undertaken by the Committee for Industrial Organisations
set up by the American Federation of Labor, headed by the leader of the
miners, John L. Lewis. There were threats and rumours of revolution and
disorder everywhere. There had poured into Washington, with the new
administration, not merely the usual crowd of hungry office-seekers, but
many thousands of young, ardent men and women anxious to have a hand
in the saving of American society. And there had come others whose
desire was to have a hand in the total reconstruction of American society
on Marxist lines. They did not advertise their presence, but it was suspected
in Washington, in Detroit, in Pittsburgh. But the great strikes, however
suspect the leadership, succeeded. United States Steel, that had resisted
attempts at unionisation so successfully in 1919, made peace with the new
steel union. One after the other the other steel companies, and the auto-
mobile companies, recognised the unions. Only the stubborn individual-
ist, Henry Ford, held out. But long before he gave way the Supreme Court
had transformed its own position, and that of the unions, by validating the
‘Wagner Act’, passed in 1935, which had put the power of the federal law
and administration behind the unions. Its constitutionality was con-
tested, but by a majority of one the Act was upheld ; a victory for organised
labour that outweighed the split in the labour movement, for the American
Federation of Labor expelled its committee and the unions which sup-
ported it. The ‘Committee for Industrial Organisation’ became the ‘Con-
gress of Industrial Organisations’, keeping the now magic letters C.I.O.
Equally important was the effect of this and comparable decisions on
the court fight. If the court was no longer an obstacle to social legislation,
much of the driving force behind the ‘court plan’ would disappear. With
each favourable decision, it did; the bill was rejected and the administra-
tion, within six months of its prodigious triumph, was defeated. Or was
it? For justices now began to retire under new pension provisions and,
before the end of his years as President, Roosevelt had nominated every
member save one, and that one, Harlan F. Stone, he had promoted to be
Chief Justice. The court ceased to be an obstacle to federal legislation and
most of the original legislation of the New Deal was re-enacted, barring
the unfortunate ‘codes of fair competition’. Child labour, minimum
wages, hours of work were now subject to federal legislation. A silent
revolution in federal-state relations was accomplished.
But, if the New Deal triumphed in the courts, it did not triumph in all
fields. Disastrous unemployment had been one of the main causes of the
overthrow of the Republicans and, although the new administration or the
flux of time had reduced the number of the workless, millions still de-
pended on charity or on state or federal aid. In the first years of the New
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Deal, various temporary bodies were set up to create work. One of these,
the Civilian Conservation Corps, took young unemployed men into camps
run, on a non-military basis, by the army, fed them, paid them and re-
habilitated them. The C.C.C. was soon the only New Deal experiment
that had hardly any enemies. Relief for older unemployed took two forms.
In what came to be called the Works Progress Administration, temporary
jobs were provided, some of them intrinsically useful, some not. And the
head of the ‘W.P.A.’, Harry Hopkins, was suspected of diverting his
resources into fields that were politically likely to be fruitful as well as
beneficial to the unemployed. The other great spending agency, the Public
Works Administration, under the vigilant and irascible Secretary of the
Interior, Harold L. Ickes, was run on very different lines. Its projects
were all long-term and of intrinsic value, and never in American history
had such vast sums been spent with so little whisper of political or
financial scandal.
But the unemployed remained. A drop in government expenditure
brought about a ‘recession’ and in the congressional elections of 1938,
although Democratic majorities remained abnormally large, the moribund
Republican party of 1936 showed itself full of life and fight. And in the
new Congress the President had to cajole, persuade, beg, instead of
ordering.
Now the thoughts of the President were more and more turned outward.
The economic and political isolation of the first years was abandoned.
The efforts of the Secretary of State, by the system of reciprocal trade
agreements, to make a breach in the lofty tariff wall, were supported by
his chief. As the League of Nations collapsed before Italian aggression
in Abyssinia, as Hitler occupied the Rhineland, as the Spanish Civil War
presaged a greater, the President began to test American public opinion.
In a speech at Chicago in October 1937 he advocated an economic quaran-
tine of the aggressors (below, p. 710). Public opinion refused to follow.
Munich shocked that opinion but did not change it, and all the President’s
efforts to get the Neutrality Acts amended failed. But, as the second world
war drew nearer, the political aspect of the United States changed and
what had only been a device of politicians fearful of losing the next elec-
tion if the master politician was not in the field became a more serious
possibility. Men who had no liking for the innovation, and were not
necessarily worried about the election, began to worry about the fate of
the United States and began to talk, more and more openly, of an un-
precedented solution to the internal and external problem, a third term
for the President.
That talk grew louder as the war came. In November 1939 the President
forced through an amendment of the Neutrality Acts permitting the bel-
ligerents to buy war supplies on a ‘cash and carry basis’ and that, in
1939, meant that Britain and France could buy the war supplies they could
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pay for and take away in their own ships. It was an alteration of the law
to the disadvantage of Germany. The great German victories of the spring
and summer of 1940 made the re-nomination of Roosevelt a certainty.
Great sums were hastily voted for armaments; two eminent Republicans
were brought into the Cabinet as Secretaries of War and the Navy; the
President began to consider how best to aid Britain, now alone and soon
to be beleaguered.
The chief Republican candidates for the nomination had, unfortunately
for themselves, committed themselves to a policy of strict neutrality before
Hitler upset the confident expectation of a certain if slow allied victory.
Senator Vandenberg, Senator Taft and the young District Attorney of
New York, Thomas E. Dewey, were, to the surprise of all the professionals,
beaten by Wendell Willkie, perhaps the darkest horse in Am erican history.
A few years before he had been a Tammany Democrat. He had only come
into public notice as a vigorous defender of the utility companies, which he
headed against the T.V.A. The presidency was the first public office he
had ever aimed at. Willkie made a gallant campaign and it is possible
that if the war had ended before the election he would have won it. But
the war went on; the British stand excited admiration and anxiety. The
President, by a series of agreements, aided Britain with destroyers, weapons,
supplies in return for bases in the western hemisphere. Roosevelt won,
and in the new Congress produced the scheme of ‘Lend-Lease’ in the
form of a bill happily and deliberately numbered ‘1776’. If this was
neutrality, it was neutrality of a totally novel kind. When Russia was
attacked Lend-Lease was extended to her; but still the Germans held their
hand. It was the Japanese who precipitated the decision and saved the
administration from a more and more difficult situation. Refused any
concessions by the United States, convinced that American support to
China was the main reason why China could still resist, the military party
in Japan took the same decision as the military party took in Germany in
1917. On 7 December 1941 the main Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Oahu
was wrecked from the air. A few hours later the main air force at Manila
was wrecked on the ground. The United States was at war with Japan
and, in a few days, with Germany and Italy, which supported their ally.
The role of the United States in the second world war was very dif-
ferent from that in the first. Then she had been an active belligerent for
only a few months. Now she was in action from the day she was attacked
and underwent a series of disasters with few parallels in her history.
The loss of Corregidor ended resistance in the Philippines and, until
the battle of Midway (June 1942), it was by no means certain that the
Japanese could not successfully attack the Hawaiian islands, if not the
mainland.
The manner of American entry into the war produced a far more real
unity and energy than had existed in 1917. The scale of the war imposed a
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far more rigorous control of the American economy, a far more severe
call on manpower. By the end of the war over 12,000,000 men were in
arms and the United States was by far the greatest naval and one of the
two greatest military powers in the world. The war was fought, too, with
a more serious sense of the possibility of defeat and with less ideological
emphasis than the first war had been. Roosevelt was in any case not such
a master of the great oration as Wilson had been and neither the ‘Four
Freedoms’ (January 1941) nor the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) had
the effect of Wilson’s speeches. And after America was a belligerent
she had as an ally Soviet Russia, whose ruler had no intention of letting
Roosevelt take the propaganda lead that Wilson had assumed in 1917-18.
Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was as a war leader. Unlike Wilson,
he had pondered the problems of war and of defence. He had built up
the navy, even before 1939, as much as Congress allowed him to. He had,
with great boldness and skill, managed to get Congress to agree to con-
scription in time of formal peace in 1940, and he chose and supported his
war leaders with good judgement and resolution. Yet the first year of their
participation in the war was one of frustration for Americans, and this
was reflected in the near defeat of the Democrats in the congressional and
local elections of 1942. But the tide had already turned. Allied armies
landed in North Africa just after the elections ; Guadalcanal was at last
won in the Pacific; soon the Russians were to capture a German army at
Stalingrad.
Public opinion was now prepared for American participation in a peace
settlement; everyone was anxious to avoid or to forget the mistakes of
1919. A ‘bi-partisan’ foreign policy was preached and, to some extent,
practised. At a series of Allied conferences, the higher strategy of the war
was planned and the character of the peace outlined. Again, as 1944
approached, there was no question of who would be the Democratic
candidate. The only change since 1940 was the dropping of the Vice-
President, Henry A. Wallace, in favour of Senator Harry S. Truman of
Missouri. The Republicans nominated Thomas E. Dewey, now governor
of New York. By the time the election came, victory, as in 1918, was in
sight, but it was not so near. Roosevelt was again elected and, in Febru-
ary of 1945, went with the British Prime Minister to Yalta to meet the
Russian ruler, Stalin. Hitler’s Germany was on its last legs ; Mussolini’s
Italy existed only as a ghost. The net of American naval and military
might was drawn, closer and closer, round Japan and already it was
probable that the Americans would soon have in their power the most
destructive weapon in the history of mankind, the atom bomb. Suddenly,
to the surprise even of his intimates, Roosevelt died at Warm Springs in
Georgia on 12 April 1945, a month before the end of the Third Reich.
Few Presidents have been more loved and hated. After his first few
months, his support came mainly from the economically distressed or
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discontented ; to the wealthier classes he became an object of hatred sur-
passing that evoked by his hero, Andrew Jackson. Under his administra-
tions, if not solely or even mainly because of him, the whole economic and
political balance of power in the United States was altered and, probably,
the balance of power in the world; for a less bold and ingenious leader
might have been at a total loss in the desperate year 1940. By his greatly
extended use of the press conference and of wireless, above all in the
‘fireside chats’, he continually and effectively appealed to the people over
the heads of Congress. Few Presidents have so completely overshadowed
their colleagues and, indeed, opponents. Roosevelt’s successor was hardly
known to the public, but it fell to him to deal with the other Allied chiefs
in the ruins of Berlin, to receive at Potsdam the news that the atom bomb
tests had succeeded, and to authorise the use of the bomb against Japan.
Already (26 June) a new international organisation, the United Nations,
had been launched at San Francisco. On 14 August the Japanese
surrendered.
The United States was the most powerful and richest nation in a world
which her armies, navies, air fleets literally engirdled and all parts of which
were, in various fashions and degrees, involved in American economic fife
and were dependants of American wealth and bounty. But it was not a
confident and assured nation that looked back on its unprecedented
achievement and power. For the old world in which America could keep
to herself was gone for ever, gone in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, and in much else which the war had wrought. There was
exultation, as in 1865 and in 1918, that ‘the dreadful trip was done’ but,
underlying the euphoria of victory, a knowledge that nothing could now
minister to them ‘that sweet sleep which they owed yesterday’.
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LATIN AMERICA
T he independence achieved by the states of Latin America in the
nineteenth century was political only. These twenty-odd new nations,
varying greatly in size, in peoples and in resources, suspicious of
their former rulers and of each other, had one characteristic in common :
a heavy dependence upon events and movements outside their own
borders. As specialised primary producers, they had to rely on foreign
markets to dispose of their goods and on foreign investment to develop
their resources. As heirs of revolution and often victims of political and
financial instability, many of them experienced active foreign intervention.
In the nineteenth century the intervening powers were usually European;
except for the episode of the Texan war, and the period of impotence
during the American civil war, the United States government upheld
Latin-American independence. It not only disapproved of European
interference and influence; on the whole it refrained from interference
itself. In the twentieth century, however, there was to be a dramatic
exchange of political roles. European influence declined; North Ameri-
can influence increased; and some of the major Latin-American states
began to move haltingly towards a real independence. The process was
punctuated and accelerated by two world wars and a world depression of
unexampled severity.
In 1898 Spain, after a brief war with the United States, lost the last
fragments of a great American empire — Cuba and Puerto Rico. No
longer feared and hated as an ‘imperialist’ power, Spain was to become
the object of sentimental respect and affection and the centre of Pan-
Hispanic feeling. Great Britain, though a colonial power, still by far the
largest investor in Latin America, the principal source of manufactured
goods and the biggest single market for food and raw materials, showed
less and less inclination to political interference, especially since the grow-
ing naval power of Germany made it necessary for British governments
to court North American friendship. France, despite a long record of
interventions in the nineteenth century, seemed even less likely than
Spain or England to become involved politically in Latin-American affairs.
In the United States, on the other hand, a rising national feeling, a
growing sense of power, created a desire for a more aggressive inter-
pretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The Venezuelan boundary dispute in
1897 had been made the occasion for strident pronouncements by
North American statesmen. In inter-American affairs the United States
was taking a resolute lead. The first Pan-American conference had met
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at Washington in 1889; a second was convened in Mexico in 1901.
Pan-Americanism might appear to offer more solid advantages than a
sentimental Pan-Hispanism or than vague proposals for a purely Latin-
American league.
Pan-Americanism, however, with its assumption of common sentiment
and common interests throughout the hemisphere, rested to some extent
on an illusion. Most Latin-American states had closer kinship with
Latin Europe than with Protestant North America, and for many South
Americans Europe was physically more accessible than the United States,
or indeed than other Latin-American countries. Pan-Americanism was
largely the product of North American policy; it was long suspected of
being an instrument of North American political and economic power,
and for the first three decades of the new century it made little headway.
Among Latin-American states in 1900, four stood out from the rest as
leaders in power, wealth and political stability. In Brazil, by far the largest
state in area and in population, a military revolution in 1889 had ousted
the Braganza monarchy. The resulting constitution, in 1891, had inaugu-
rated a federal republic in which the several states enjoyed wide autonomy,
including power to levy export taxes and to raise military forces, and in
which the federal authority was relatively weak. Political leadership was
shared between Sao Paulo and Minas Geraes, the coffee-growing and
mining states of central Brazil. Government rested not upon the popular
vote, nor upon party organisation, but upon a convention of balance of
power between these two states, each of which provided four presidents
between 1894 and 1930. Subject to this convention, a president could
usually contrive to nominate his successor by an understanding with the
governors of the states and with the majority in Congress, which first
helped to manage the presidential election and then acted as arbiter of
its legality. The system succeeded, as a rule, in raising men of marked
ability to the presidential chair.
The political conventions of Brazil directly reflected the current eco-
nomic trends. The country’s prosperity, once based on sugar and tobacco,
now depended upon the export of vast quantities of coffee, supplemented
by wild rubber and other forest products from the Amazon basin. The
coffee industry demanded the construction of ports and railways and, for
this, capital was needed. A £10,000,000 loan, negotiated with the Roth-
schilds during a presidential visit to Europe, tided the country over a
financial crisis in 1899. Rio de Janeiro and Santos grew from squalid
waterfront towns into fine modern harbours in the early years of the
twentieth century. The coffee economy of Brazil was built up by a steady
flow of British, French and German capital, and of Portuguese, Italian
and German labour; while most of the coffee was sold in the United States.
What coffee was to Brazil, beef and wheat were to Argentina. Much of
the beef was exported to Great Britain. The production of beef suitable for
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the British market required enclosed pasture, good transport arrange-
ments and elaborate processes of preparation. Barbed wire, the railway
and the frigorifico were the instruments of Argentine prosperity, and for
the most part British investors provided the capital, British and North
American manufacturers the machinery. Rural society was patriarchal,
with immense areas of good land in the hands of relatively few owners.
It was this business-like landowning oligarchy, with its characteristic
pride in good stock, which imported English pedigree bulls and developed
the high quality, as well as the vast quantity, of Argentine beef production.
The large-scale export of grain began considerably later than the export
of beef, but by 1904 its value was even greater than that of beef. The
development of arable farming created a great demand for labour; and,
like Brazil, Argentina attracted large numbers of immigrants, mostly
Spanish and Italian. Many of these immigrants were seasonal visitors —
golondrinas — who returned to Europe after each harvest ; but more than
three million of them made permanent homes in Argentina between 1880
and 1913.
As in Brazil, government, while adhering to constitutional forms,
depended largely upon deals between members and groups of the land-
owning oligarchy. Subject to these deals, the presidents nominated not
only their successors, but provincial governors, members of Congress, and
most of the important officials. In Argentina, however, unlike Brazil,
there was no longer a balance of influence between semi-autonomous
states. Wealth and political power were more and more concentrated in
the humid pampa area surrounding Buenos Aires, and in the capital
itself. A radical party existed, which clamoured for free elections and
occasionally staged revolts, provoked by the consistent manipulation of
political affairs. These incidents were all confined to the capital, none
aroused much popular interest, and none caused serious alarm. Condi-
tions in general were stable. A series of conservative governments pro-
vided adequate and orderly administration in a time of rising prosperity,
and appeared in little danger of being unseated by elections, financial
crises, or accusations of corruption and extravagance.
Chile, the third of the so-called ‘A.B.C.’ powers of South America, was
by far the smallest in area and in population. Most of the people lived
by farming in the beautiful and fertile valleys of central Chile. As in
Argentina, a small number of families owned most of the productive
land; but methods of farming and estate management were conservative,
paternal, somewhat feckless, and Chile, though an agricultural country,
imported food. Most of the public wealth came from the copper mines
of the western Cordillera, and above all from the northern coastal desert
provinces, which yielded the world’s chief supply of natural nitrates. The
nitrates were dug and exported to the wheat- growing areas of the world
by companies employing Chilean labour, but financed mainly by British,
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and later North American, capital. There was thus a serious and growing
division between political power and economic reality. Political power,
as in most Latin-American states, was in the hands of the landowning
aristocracy, who controlled a Congress elected by a narrowly restricted
franchise. Moreover, as a result of the civil war of 1891, the power of the
executive had been so severely curtailed that Congress could always either
control or frustrate the policy of the president. Inevitably the ruling
oligarchy split into many shifting factions. Most governments were coali-
tions, most cabinets short-lived and unstable. Meanwhile the steady
activity of the nitrate trade encouraged the growth of a commercial and
professional middle class and of a small industrial labour force. The
export tax on nitrates enabled social services and popular education to
develop more rapidly than in most other Latin-American countries. In
the long run these would inevitably prove powerful solvents of aristo-
cratic government; but so long as the nitrate market remained firm the
business of the country could be carried on, if not with conspicuous
efficiency, at least with moderation and due regard for law, by a cultivated
and, on the whole, remarkably public-spirited aristocracy.
Mexico, like Chile, depended for most of its revenue upon the export
of minerals. The chief mineral products included gold, silver, lead, zinc,
copper, antimony and, in the present century, petroleum; the first success-
ful oil well was drilled in 1901. In Mexico, as in Chile, mineral resources
were developed, railways and harbour works built, with foreign capital,
by foreign engineers and managers and native labour. The great majority
of Mexicans, however, lived by agriculture, upon the relatively small area
of cultivable land afforded by an arid and mountainous country. The
ownership of land was concentrated, to an even greater extent than in
Chile, in a small number of very large, self-contained estates. Mexico
lacked the racial homogeneity of Chile ; persons of mixed blood formed a
majority of the population, but the big hacendados were often of European
descent, while most agricultural labourers were either Indians or mestizos
in whom Indian blood predominated. Many landlords were absentees.
Labourers were bound to the estates by a deep feeling for the land on which
their forebears had lived, but which they no longer owned ; and by peonage,
a species of serfdom based upon truck payments on credit, keeping the
peon in a condition of debt-slavery which, in custom if not in law, was
usually hereditary. The land hunger of these dispossessed peones was the
most striking characteristic of Mexican society, and was to prove in the
twentieth century a powerful explosive force.
Mexico had been governed since 1 876 by an efficient and ruthless dic-
tatorship. Porfirio Diaz throughout his reign observed most of the forms
of a federal constitution ; but effectively he ruled his wild and heterogeneous
country through an intricate network of jobs and personal loyalties.
Judges, state governors, deputies in Congress were all his men, and so
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were the rurales, the highly efficient but arbitrary irregular police. A
mestizo himself, he was not without a genial intuitive sympathy with his
Indian subjects; but he did not seek, and could not afford, to offend the
great landowners, and the incorporation of ejidos — village common lands
— in private haciendas, whether by purchase, fraud or force, reached its
peak in his time. He was no demagogue, and preached no military
nationalist aggrandisement. His regular army, or at least its rank and file,
was largely fictitious. His foreign policy included friendship with the
United States, scrupulous service of acknowledged debts and adherence
to treaties, and enthusiastic participation in schemes of international
co-operation. The second Pan-American Conference met in Mexico in
1901-2; and in 1906-7 Mexico collaborated with the United States in an
ambitious and statesmanlike plan for peace-making in Central America.
At home, Diaz sought above all to exploit the most remunerative resources
of Mexico, and to build impressive public works, by offering the most
tempting terms to foreign investors. Mines, harbours, railways, factories,
oilfields developed under foreign control and much farm and pasture
land in their neighbourhood passed into foreign ownership, British, North
American and German. Don Porfirio made himself famous, and his
country liked and respected, abroad. At home he allowed his people to
become strangers in their own land.
The chief economic and political characteristics of these four great
states were present in varying degrees in most of the twenty-odd republics.
Latin America in the early twentieth century was a land of promise, a
magnet for the enterprise, the capital and the skill of more industrialised
peoples. It was becoming a major source of a number of vitally important
commodities. The government of most of its larger states was orderly,
effective, sympathetic to investors. Its prosperity, if measured in terms of
production, of exports and of public revenue, was rising steadily. All
the Latin-American states, however, suffered from dangerous, but for the
time hidden, economic and political maladies. They all depended for their
revenues upon the export of one or two commodities, either foodstuffs
or raw materials for industry. They were therefore extremely vulnerable
to changes of price in the world market. They had nearly all become
deeply indebted, through constant public and private borrowing from
foreign sources, often at high rates, sometimes for unproductive purposes;
and the willingness of European investors to throw good money after bad
made it difficult to call a halt to this financial rake’s progress. Most Latin
Americans lived by agriculture, usually employing primitive and wasteful
methods ; they derived no direct and obvious benefit from the inflow of
foreign capital or from the proceeds of the specialised export trades. They
did not, as a rule, own the land they worked; if tenants or share-croppers,
the terms of their tenure were often harsh and insecure. They had, there-
fore, a ready grievance.
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Of those Latin- American countries which practised constitutional govern-
ment, the majority were governed by somewhat theoretical constitutional
rules, mostly borrowed from the constitution of the United States, owing
little to the realities of Latin-American history and circumstances, com-
manding littlegeneralrespect.Theextremelyartificialnatureof ‘federalism’
in many states was an obvious example. The letter of the constitution often
gave no indication of where real power lay. Constitutional remedies were
so ineffective against powerful groups or personal interests that only
revolution could effect a real change of administration; and ‘revolution’
often meant no more than an extra-legal demonstration calling for a
change. The chief concession to realism in most Latin-American con-
stitutions was the emergency power of suspending constitutional ‘ guaran-
tees’, entrusted to the president precisely to enable him to forestall such
‘revolutions’. In many states constitutional government was a brittle
facade; in some of the smaller states it hardly existed.
As in public affairs, so in more individual realms of spirit and mind the
Latin-American peoples showed the symptoms of dependence upon im-
ported and imperfectly assimilated ideas. Catholic Christianity was the
outward religion of most people ; but in many of the republics great num-
bers of Indians and mestizos hung between half-understood Christianity
and half-forgotten local pagan cults. Among such people, as for
instance in Mexico, a revolt against Christianity, once begun, was likely
to be extreme. Even among people of European descent, with a few
notable exceptions, the vital elements in Latin-American Catholicism
were — and are — the foreign religious orders and foreign currents of Catho-
lic thought. There had long been difficulty in maintaining the numbers and
standard of the priesthood. The church, moreover, as a great landowner
and a conservative force in politics, was disliked and feared by reformers,
who tended throughout Latin America to be anti-clerical and sometimes
anti-religious ; though it is fair to add that most of them greatly underesti-
mated the church’s hold upon men’s loyalty, and the secularising theories
which they advocated, from positivism down to Communism, were them-
selves mostly imported from Europe. Avowedly religious people had
long felt a vague sense of frustrated nationalism; some of them were
uneasy in their allegiance to a church whose roots in America seemed
uncomfortably shallow; but no satisfying alternative appeared. The Vati-
can was undoubtedly justified in regarding Latin America as a field of
missionary endeavour; but no effort directed from Europe could, by
itself, give to Latin-American Christianity the indigenous character which
it lacked.
Many of the capital cities of Latin America were centres of vigorous
intellectual life. Intelligent appreciation and discussion of serious litera-
ture, and to a lesser degree of music and the visual arts, had long been
characteristic of educated town dwellers. Poetry never lacked an audience
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in any part of Latin America; but outside the towns literate people were
very few. For the most part, literary activity was confined to relatively
small groups of people and followed European models. It is true that
Facundo or Martin Fierro could have been written nowhere but in Argen-
tina, Os Sertoes nowhere but in Brazil ; but, apart from exceptional works
of genius, there had been little attempt at a development of independent
culture, which would have meant a fusion of Indian and Iberian patterns
of thought and expression. On the contrary, the liberal Latin tradition
led to France, and French cultural influence was dominant at the end of
the nineteenth century. For those who disliked French liberalism and
French anti-clericalism, the most tempting alternative lay in a return to
the Hispanic tradition.
In short, Latin America in 1900 was intellectually, economically and
politically dependent upon the outside world. Its cultural life, though
varied and active, lacked native self-confidence and drew its inspiration
from abroad. Its economic and political life, though occasionally turbu-
lent within its own area, assumed peace and stability elsewhere. Neither
the national economies nor the national political structures were designed
to withstand general adversity.
There was, indeed, no obvious reason for expecting adversity. Between
the turn of the century and the outbreak of the first world war, the
prosperity of Europe continued to overflow into Latin America. Progress
was especially rapid in Argentina. The introduction of lucerne as a fodder
crop, the substitution, from 1907, of a chilling process for crude freezing,
the meticulous grading and pricing of fine stock, together built up an
export trade in good beef unparalleled in the world. Buenos Aires became
the greatest city of the southern hemisphere, and the centre of a railway
system almost equal in extent to that of the United Kingdom.
In this period of rapid economic progress, however, three striking and
significant developments took place which proved portents for the future.
They were a peaceful but radical constitutional change in Argentina, an
extremely violent social and political revolution in Mexico, and a remark-
able growth of North American power and assertiveness in Central
America and the Caribbean islands.
The Radical Civic Union, the precursor of the Radical party of modern
Argentina, had been formed in 1892, and for twenty years devoted itself
to the apparently hopeless task of electoral reform. Yet reform, when it
came, was the work not directly of the Radicals, but of a member of that
aristocratic caste which the Radicals wished to unseat — Roque Saenz
Pena, President from 1910 to 1913, a distinguished lawyer and a statesman
of exceptional probity and devotion. Saenz Pena, apparently from motives
of pure conviction, insisted in 1912 on the passage of the electoral law
which bears his name, providing for universal male suffrage and secret,
compulsory voting. This revolutionary enactment — for so it was in the
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circumstances — by enfranchising the industrial and largely immigrant
population of Buenos Aires, changed the whole basis of Argentine politics.
Assisted by a daily press distinguished for responsibility and moderation,
it promised a progressive liberalisation of government. It was also to
reveal in time the dangers attending a sudden injection of democracy into
a body politic largely unprepared for such treatment. Its first result was
the election of Hipolito Irigoyen to the presidency in 1916, and the
inauguration of a period of Radical rule broken only by revolution in
1930.
The Mexican revolution of 1910- 11 was far more drastic and far-
reaching. Its im mediate causes included a financial depression in 1907,
crop failures in 1907 and 1908, brutality in the suppression of the conse-
quent strikes, and a wave of anti-foreign feeling and of political agitation.
The armed rising which, in a few months, hounded Porfirio Diaz from
office and from the country was led by a liberal theorist, Francisco
Madero, with the conventional battle-cry of ‘no re-election’; but it
quickly threw up a host of other leaders — agrarian rabble-rousers such as
Zapata, bandits like Pancho Villa, military adventurers like Huerta, the
murderer and successor of Madero. Mexico suffered ten years of almost
continuous civil war, and, since all parties looked to the United States as
a source of arms. President Wilson’s government was soon drawn into the
conflict, supplying weapons to the self-styled constitutionalists under
Carranza and denying them to Huerta. The inevitable incident occurred —
an affront to American marines at Tampico: and in 1914 the United
States intervened and seized the port of Vera Cruz. The intervention
helped to remove Huerta, but failed to place the ‘constitutional’ party
in power; and naturally it provoked universal resentment. An offer of
mediation, however, made jointly by the ‘A.B.C.’ powers, enabled Wilson
to withdraw without undue loss of dignity. The fighting went on; and
eventually Carranza secured the presidency not by North American help,
but by publicly accepting a programme in which he certainly did not
believe — the agrarian reform programme of Zapata and his Indians. Thus
in the midst of destruction, and almost unnoticed abroad because of the
greater war then raging, a remarkable blueprint of a nascent new order
was produced in the constitution of 1917, which is still the constitution
of Mexico. Its political provisions contained little that was new; they
repeated and expanded the radical and bitterly anti-clerical constitution
of 1857, which the astute manipulations of Diaz had rendered ineffective.
The most striking innovations were in the economic clauses. In article
123 a comprehensive, and for the time extremely generous, industrial
labour code was written into the constitution. Article 27, more revolu-
tionary still, proclaimed a reversal of the whole trend of Mexican agrarian
history. It declared all land, water and minerals to be national property,
private ownership existing only by an implied and conditional public
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grant, and certain types of mineral-bearing land, including oilfields, being
inalienable. It restricted the regions in which foreigners might acquire
land and the terms on which they could hold and use it. It limited nar-
rowly the area which might be owned by a single person or corporation,
and forbade ecclesiastical bodies to hold land. It promised the restoration
of all village common fields alienated since 1854, and authorised grants
of land — presumably to be confiscated from private estates — to villages
which possessed no commons. Agrarian bitterness had by that time
reached such a pitch, and fighting was so widespread, that this drastic
programme of redistribution was probably the only way of securing any
semblance of peace. As it was, the opportunist Carranza failed either to
govern or to keep his agrarian promises. He was driven out by his lieu-
tenant, Obregon, in 1919, and soon afterwards murdered. Peace of a kind
was achieved with the election of Obregon to the presidency in 1921;
but nearly twenty years more were needed to enforce the new order, and
an unpredictable length of time to make it work.
Meanwhile revolutions of another kind were shaking the small repub-
lics of Central America. The Spanish-American War had started the United
States on a career of intervention which might become a career of colonial
aggression. Puerto Rico was annexed in 1899. Cuba, the largest and
richest of the Caribbean islands, after a short period of North American
occupation, became politically independent in 1902 ; but the United States
retained a base at Guantanamo and, under the Platt amendment, a right
to intervene in the event of serious disorder. North American attention
was drawn to the political affairs of the Caribbean countries by the pros-
pect of a ship canal through Central America, and by the desire of the
United States government to control the canal approaches. Shortly after
the end of the Spanish-American War, two obstacles to the building of the
canal, one diplomatic, the other territorial, had been removed. The diplo-
matic obstacle was the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850. The British govern-
ment agreed, after some discussion, to replace that instrument by the
Hay-Pauncefote treaty of 1902, which provided for a canal controlled
and fortified by the United States. The territorial obstacle was the attitude
of Colombia to the project of a canal through Colombian territory. An
opportune revolt broke out in the Panama province of Colombia in 1903.
United States naval forces were employed to prevent the intervention of
the Colombian authorities; and the new republic of Panama, hastily
recognised, agreed to a treaty giving the United States virtual sovereignty
in the Canal Zone. This stroke of policy, while clearing the way for the
canal, caused bitter and lasting resentment in Colombia, and did not pass
unnoticed in the rest of Latin America (see also ch. xvm).
While Theodore Roosevelt was ‘taking the Isthmus’, the problem of
defending the Caribbean approaches was complicated by the decision of
the Hague Court of Arbitration in the Venezuelan debt dispute. This
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decision, by upholding the legality of the British, German and Italian
blockade of the Venezuelan coast, placed a premium on the use of force
as a means of collecting debts. It suggested the possibility of further
European armed interventions, sanctioned by international law, in areas
where American control was vital to the defence of the United States.
The only hope of forestalling this possibility seemed to lie in police action
by the United States government, to prevent defaults on just debts and
disorders affecting foreigners. Accordingly in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt
announced his so-called corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: a warning that
the United States might be compelled to intervene in the affairs of Latin-
American states in order to remove grounds for intervention by others.
The United States government already controlled, in effect, the affairs
of Panama. In 1905 it negotiated an agreement with the Dominican
Republic whereby the customs of that country were to be collected by
North American officers, in order to remove occasion for European action.
In 1906, to prevent a dangerous internal crisis, Cuba was reoccupied in
accordance with the Platt amendment and the relevant provisions of the
Cuban constitution. This second occupation lasted only until 1909, when
an elected administration was duly installed; but advice, often unwelcome,
continued to be proffered to the Cuban government. In the turbulent
region of Central America a conference, in which Mexico took part, was
convened at Washington in 1906-7 to formulate proposals for peace-
making. The chief task of this conference was to prevent the kind of
quarrel which arose from revolutions in one state being hatched in the
territory of another. Its main result was an ingenious agreement to with-
hold recognition from governments which seized power by revolution.
Thus within a few years the Roosevelt policy produced benevolent super-
vision in Panama, sporadic meddling in Cuba, and in Central America
a new policy of non-recognition generally regarded — and resented — as
a form of indirect intervention. These measures were not enough to keep
the peace to the satisfaction of the United States, and President Taft,
Roosevelt’s successor, soon found his Central American policy drifting
from a warning diplomacy towards the use of force. In 1909 Zelaya, the
dictator of Nicaragua, whose aggressive designs abroad and xenophobia
at home had repeatedly threatened the peace, was expelled in a revolution
backed by North American commercial concerns. In 1912 American
marines were landed in Nicaragua to prevent Zelaya from starting a
counter-revolution. Nicaragua remained under North American tutelage,
with one brief interval, until 1933. Two more armed interventions fol-
lowed, both provoked by acute internal disorder, in Haiti and in the
Dominican Republic. Haiti was occupied from 1915 to 1934, Santo
Domingo from 1916 to 1924.
A naively cynical interpretation of these moves has applied to them the
phrase ‘dollar diplomacy’. It is true that Taft’s Secretary of State, the
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egregious Knox, believed that a transfer of the public debts of the Central
American republics from European to North American holders would be
in the interests of peace; but he had great difficulty in persuading New
York bankers to make loans to such governments as Haiti, Nicaragua,
and the Dominican Republic. Only in Cuba were North American invest-
ments considerable at that time. No doubt the missionary zeal of con-
scious efficiency impelled North Americans to ‘tidy up’ these small,
disorderly republics; but the principal considerations were strategic. In
order to forestall possible European threats to the canal approaches,
successive Secretaries of State were prepared to risk the alienation of
Latin America. Of course, the policy of the United States was resented;
it was unpopular at home, where it ran counter to deep-rooted traditions;
it was naturally disliked in Central America, and over Latin America as
a whole it gave rise to deep and lasting suspicion. In Argentina especially,
journalists with ambitions for Argentine leadership in South America
made the most of evidence of Yankee imperialism. The circumstance
chiefly responsible for the strategic anxieties of the United States was
the rise of German naval power. When, in 1914, the first great war against
Germany began, the United States had hardly a friend in the Americas.
Latin America in 1914 was already far more important in world affairs
than it had been in 1900. Politically, the participation of Latin- American
delegates at the Second Hague Conference in 1907, and the intellectual
qualities which they displayed there, had opened the eyes of Europe. The
greater states of Latin America had become known and generally respected.
Above all, their economic importance had greatly increased. Europe could
not easily do without the food and the raw materials of Latin America,
and Latin-American friendship became a valuable prize of belligerent
diplomacy. In particular Germany, which in peace had ranked third
among nations trading with Latin America, embarked upon an assiduous
courtship backed by elaborate and costly propaganda. The most powerful
counter-arguments were also provided by Germany, however, in the form
of sinkings of neutral ships.
The Americas had no common policy towards the belligerents. The
governments of Mexico and Venezuela were pro-German throughout,
and in Chile, whose army was German trained, there were many German
sympathisers. These three states, with Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay
and El Salvador, remained neutral throughout the war, maintaining diplo-
matic and — as far as possible — commercial relations with all the belli-
gerents. Chile, the most formidable naval power in South America, was
subjected to a test of patience in 1915, when British warships sank the
cruiser Dresden in a Chilean harbour — a gross infringement of neutrality
for which the British government apologised. Argentine neutrality, though
strictly correct, was distinctly favourable to the Allies, and especially
sympathetic towards Italy, as was natural. Argentina won a notable
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diplomatic victory in 1917, when the German government made full
apology and reparation for the sinking of three Argentine ships. In the
latter half of 1917 Irigoyen had some difficulty in maintaining relations
with Germany in the teeth of mass meetings and resolutions of Congress
demanding rupture. Both Argentina and Uruguay gave material assis-
tance to the Allies in the form of credits for the purchase of food.
The entry of the United States into the war inevitably affected the Latin-
American position. Nearly all the states of Central America and the
Caribbean joined the United States in making formal declarations of war.
Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador broke off relations with Germany,
and handed over to the Allies all German ships in their harbours. Brazil,
whose foreign policy for years past had been conspicuous for statesman-
like moderation and respect for international law, independently declared
war on Germany in October 1917. This decision was immediately pro-
voked by the sinking of Brazilian ships; but throughout the war most
Brazilians had sympathised with the Allies, especially with France, which
they regarded as the pattern and guide of Latin civilisation. Brazilian
warships operated with the ships of the Allies in the Atlantic, though no
military forces were sent to Europe. One important internal result of
the war was a sustained attempt to ‘Brazilianise’ the German colonies in
southern Brazil.
Politically, the chief effect of the war upon the Latin-American coun-
tries was their closer participation in international affairs. All the Latin-
American states sooner or later joined the League of Nations, and most
of them were original members. Membership fluctuated somewhat, dis-
putes over the distribution of council seats being the occasion of several
resignations; but many Latin-American states remained steadily loyal.
The League appealed strongly to Latin-American idealism, and afforded a
platform on which relatively weak states could make their voices heard.
It is true that the presence in the Assembly of a large number of small
states, with a voting power out of proportion to their physical strength,
contributed to the air of unreality often characteristic of the deliberations
of that body. It is true also that some states regarded the League as a
counterpoise to the power of the United States and a substitute for the
Pan-American system which the United States favoured. Naturally the
absence of the United States from Geneva made political action by the
League in the Americas extremely difficult. Nevertheless, Latin-American
membership of the League was important and valuable. The technical
organs of the League achieved much success in Latin America, and on one
occasion the League was responsible — this time with the co-operation of
the United States — for settling a serious dispute, between Colombia and
Peru in 1933-4, over the Leticia territory (see above, pp. 257-8).
Economically the war had administered a sharp but temporary shock
to Latin America. The supply of European capital and the stream of
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immigrants suddenly ceased. Exports to Europe dropped temporarily,
through the diversion of shipping to other tasks, and then quickly re-
covered, thanks to the urgent demands of the Allies for food and raw
materials. On the other hand, imports of manufactured goods from
Europe dropped heavily, as European industry concentrated upon warlike
needs. One result of this excess of exports over imports was a tentative
industrial development in the A.B.C. states, especially in the manufacture
of textiles for the home market, and the canning and preserving of food.
This effort to achieve greater diversity and self-sufficiency in supplying
home markets has continued persistently, though not steadily at the same
speed, ever since. Another important result was a great increase, both
absolute and relative, in imports from the United States. North American
trade with Latin America held and further increased its war-time gains
after the war, despite strenuous efforts by French and British firms, in the
1 920s, to recover lost ground. On the whole, capital followed trade. In
1913 British investments in Latin America amounted to some $4,893 mil-
lion; North American investments totalled $1,242 million, and were nearly
all in Mexico and Central America, only $173 million being held in South
American countries. In 1929 British holdings were $5,889 million, North
American holdings $5,587 milli on including $3,102 million in South
America. 1 North American investments followed much the same lines
as British, but were more widely spread, less heavily concentrated in
railways and other public utilities. Direct investment predominated.
Most of the capital went into concerns such as mines, producing raw
materials for export to manufacturing countries, and into transport
developments ancillary to such concerns, rather than into industrial
undertakings producing finished goods. Throughout Latin America the
shifts of trade and finance during the war years and after thus produced not
economic independence, but a partial change of masters, an overall in-
crease in foreign capital invested, and a continued rise in apparent prosperity.
One or two important exceptions to this general trend require to be
noticed. The war caused serious dislocations in the economic life of at
least two of the leading states. Chile, though remote from the conflict,
suffered heavily from its indirect results. Sodium nitrate is not only a
fertiliser, but an ingredient in the manufacture of nitro-glycerine. During
the war the Allies bought vast quantities of Chilean nitrate; but the
Germans, cut off from Chile by the blockade, turned to the manufacture
of synthetic nitrate and succeeded in supplying most of their own needs.
After the war the use of synthetic nitrate became general. It was more
expensive than the natural product; but the governments of the great
powers all disliked dependence upon a remote source for an important
1 M. Winkler, Investments of United States Capital in Latin America (Boston, 1929),
pp. 275-83; The Republics of South America, Royal Institute of International Affairs
(Oxford, 1937), P- 182.
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munition, and preferred to make farmers pay more for fertiliser, in order
to produce the raw material of explosive within their own territories.
The Chilean share of world nitrate production fell from about 70 per cent
at the turn of the century to 35 per cent in 1924 and 11 per cent in 1931. 1
It continued to fall in the ’thirties. At the same time the world market
for copper was extremely unreliable. The population of Chile was too
small to provide a market for extensive industrial production, and the
drop in value of its two principal mineral products presented a prospect
of economic decline for which no adequate remedy has yet been found.
The war had a serious effect upon the Argentine and Uruguayan beef
industry. During the war the demand for chilled beef had been supple-
mented by a greatly increased demand for tinned or frozen beef. The
product of the tinning process is of equal insipidity whatever the quality
of beef used, and the high demand encouraged the breeding and sale of
inferior animals. At the same time, a series of disastrous failures of the
lucerne crop in the early years of the war made the production of good
beef more difficult and expensive. The cattle industry was still in this
disorganised state when the European slump of 1922 produced a sudden
break in the market and made all but the best beef unsaleable. By 1925
the rubbish had been cleared and the industry was once again paying its
way; but even then it had to make another readjustment to meet a
demand for smaller beef joints resulting from the decline in the size of
families in most parts of Europe. The chilling companies began to demand
smaller beasts. The big shorthorn bullocks which had hitherto commanded
the highest prices fell from favour and had to be replaced by stockier
breeds such as the Aberdeen Angus. This change was still in progress
when Argentina, with the rest of Latin America, received the staggering
blow of the 1930 depression.
Apart from these troubled industries, Latin America throughout most
of the 1 920s was peaceful and prosperous. In Brazil cotton appeared
alongside coffee as an important export crop and cattle (though of poor
quality) increased considerably in numbers in the southern states. There
was steady development in mining and in industry; Brazil, though lacking
convenient coal, possesses large quantities of iron ore. In the arid north-
ern states, post-war governments spent large sums on dams for water
storage. There was a steady overall growth of population, both by immi-
gration and by natural increase; and in the south, a slow but steady
advance in state-sponsored colonisation. The most remarkable increase
in wealth during this period, however, took place in the republics of the
northern Andes, especially in Venezuela, where immense oil-fields were
discovered. Venezuela was a backward pastoral and agricultural country;
it still is, away from the cities, the oil-fields, and the more recently
1 C. A. Thomson, ‘Chile Struggles for National Recovery’, Foreign Policy Reports, ix
(1934), P- 288.
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exploited iron-ore deposits. The export of oil began in 1918; by 1930
Venezuela was producing more than 10 per cent of the total world supply,
and thanks to petroleum royalties was the only Latin-American state un-
encumbered by public debt. Nearly all the oil produced was exported, and
nearly all production was — and is — in the hands of foreign firms, British
and North American. The national economy came to depend, therefore,
principally upon the price of oil in the world outside.
Peru, Colombia and Ecuador also developed oil-fields in the ’twenties,
and all granted concessions to foreign capital for this purpose as well as
for the development of public services. None of these countries, however,
reached anything approaching the Venezuelan level of production, or
became so dangerously dependent on oil. Colombia in particular enjoyed
a period of very considerable prosperity and progress. The foreign trade
of the country more than doubled, and expanding exports included coffee,
cacao and sugar as well as oil. Two commercial and industrial cities,
Cali and Medellin, in valleys far from the capital, grew rapidly, Medellin
especially becoming an important centre of mining and textile manufacture
in this period. Peru was more centralised than Colombia, more dependent
upon its capital, Lima, and the near-suburban port of Callao. Peruvian
society, moreover, was dangerously split between the isolated highland
population, Indian and agricultural, and the people of the coast, largely
European in outlook, concerned with commerce, mining, and to some
extent industry. Despite these disadvantages, considerable development
and diversification took place in the ’twenties. Peru exported copper,
cotton, sugar and various other agricultural products as well as oil; and,
as in the neighbouring countries, its economic life was largely and increas-
ingly controlled by foreign capital.
One characteristic common to nearly all Latin-American countries in
this prosperous era of the ’twenties was concern over the wages, working
conditions and general welfare of industrial labour. The attention of
governments was directed to problems of labour by the general desire to
speed up the slow process of industrialisation. International discussion
of such problems through the International Labour Organisation of the
League of Nations stimulated interest, and so, no doubt, did the Mexican
constitution of 1917. An advanced labour code became a matter of
national prestige, a badge of membership of the comity of civilised states.
Moreover, in most parts of Latin America mines, oil wells and factories
were foreign-owned. Pressure brought upon foreign employers to raise
wages and improve conditions was popular, patriotic, and politically safe.
There could be no doubt of the need, by European or North American
standards, for very considerable improvement of labour conditions.
Argentina, Brazil and Chile all set up separate ministries or departments
of labour, and they and several other states enacted labour codes, in-
cluding such principles of social legislation as the eight-hour day, the
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right to strike, the minimum wage, and protection of women and children.
Uruguay — once a battle-ground of gaucho armies, become peaceful and
prosperous through the export of beef — and Chile embarked on schemes
of national insurance. The volume and quality of legislation were im-
pressive, but much of it was based on European and North American
ideals and did not necessarily correspond to local needs. In most countries
it hardly touched agricultural life, especially where employers were native
and the personal relation between patron and peon was strong. Even in
industrial centres much legislation failed in its purpose because of the lack
of adequate inspection. The activity of legislative bodies in many parts of
Latin America has often seemed in inverse proportion to the ability to put
laws into effect.
The movement to improve labour conditions came chiefly from above —
from governments — rather than from below. Trade union organisation
was weak everywhere; socialist movements, where they existed, were in
infancy, and sometimes proscribed. A distinctive feature of the whole
movement, however, has been the connection between industrial labour
and the student population. Latin-American universities for the most part
offer professional and technical training rather than general education;
students are numerous; their organisations have considerable solidarity,
and are often very active politically. Their activity usually issues in a
vague clamour for reform rather than in support of a definite party
programme, but it can be extremely vociferous and sometimes violent.
In some countries it became in the ’twenties, and has since remained, a
considerable political nuisance.
The governments which inaugurated all these programmes of social
betterment in the ’twenties varied greatly in political form. In some
countries, notably Colombia, the pre-war pattern of a landowning oli-
garchy governing through a discreetly manipulated constitution survived
with little change. In Brazil the pre-war routine went on, though it was
troubled by several abortive military outbreaks. In a few countries, con-
stitutional radicalism was temporarily in the ascendant. The Radical party
in Argentina (‘Whig’ would perhaps be a more descriptive title) had
come to power as a result of the Saenz Pena electoral reform. In Chile
an analogous change of government took place in 1920. Alessandri, the
new President, came from the northern province of Tarapaca and was
avowedly the representative of labour and middle-class interests. The
economic plight of the country and congressional opposition to pro-
posals for reform compelled Alessandri to abandon the old 1833 constitu-
tion and to introduce a new one, ratified by plebiscite, which greatly
increased the powers of the President. The outcome was a series of coups
d'etat, and from 1927 a military quasi-dictatorship, which carried into
effect most of the provisions of Alessandri’s reform programme. A pro-
nounced characteristic of the radical parties in general was the intensely
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personal nature of their organisation. Irigoyen, the Argentine radical
leader, who served twice as President, was known as the last of the
caudillos; his personal control over every detail of party organisation
and national government, his heavy-handed intervention in provincial
government, recalled the methods of the old caudillos ; but at least his
actions came within the letter of the constitution. Several republics in
the ’twenties, on the other hand, were governed without any serious
pretence of constitutional forms, and carried through considerable pro-
grammes of development and reform by means of undisguised dictator-
ship. Unscrupulous politicians were learning the uses of an industrial
proletariat as a support for unconstitutional power. Leguia, ruler of
Peru from 1919 to 1930, was a man of humble origin whose seizure of
power was supported by middle-class and labour interests, and whose
programme included legislation for the protection of labour, general
education, and redistribution of land, as well as the usual elaborate
public works. A considerable part of the programme, especially in public
works and in education, was put into effect by means of public loans
raised in the United States. The perfect pattern of the radical dictator, how-
ever, was Juan Vicente Gomez, the uneducated mestizo who for twenty-
six years, under various official titles, dominated the affairs of Venezuela.
Gomez’s armoury included all the now-familiar weapons of censorship,
of secret police, of torture, of imprisonment without trial for political
offences, of the distribution of responsible offices among those of the
dictator’s relatives who showed capacity and loyalty. Gomez ran Vene-
zuela with ruthlessness and shrewd business efficiency. Like Leguia, he
specialised in education and costly public works; but he was preserved
from financial difficulties by the revenues from the oil industry. He died
in his bed in 1935, still in office, immensely wealthy and universally
respected. His nominated successor took over without serious commotion
and the Gomez system lasted until 1945, when a revolution placed the
Democratic Action party — a constitutionalist, middle-class body — in
power.
Constitutional government, then, was by no means universal in Latin
America even in the peaceful and prosperous ’twenties. On the other
hand, the habit of revolution seemed to have been broken in most coun-
tries. To have broken it in Venezuela was Gomez’s proudest boast. In
leading states such as Argentina, which had known no violent change of
government for half a century, stability and order were taken for granted.
Everywhere great advances had been made in replacing the rule of force,
of interest or of caprice, by the rule of law. Yet the underlying weakness,
the excessive dependence upon the outside world, the failure to develop
indigenous creative power, remained. World forces over which the Latin
Americans had little control were to launch them into a period of dis-
order and distress.
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The great depression of world trade which set in towards the end of
1929 struck Latin America almost immediately and with disastrous re-
sults. The Latin-American countries were more vulnerable, perhaps, than
ever before. They depended upon foreign sources for many essential
goods and services ; they relied upon the export of a few basic commodities
to pay for their very varied purchases. They were in many cases under
contractual obligations to supply their customers, and the burden of
their contracts was greatly increased by the fall in prices. Most of them
were saddled with a heavy load of public and private debt. Their public
revenues, out of which interest had to be paid and administration main-
tained, were drawn largely from export and import duties, which shrank
alarmingly as trade declined. Faced with economic crisis, all govern-
ments except Venezuela and Argentina defaulted on their interest pay-
ments abroad; and all, perforce, reduced expenditure at home. Spending
on works of capital development, on public health, on education, was
drastically reduced. Governments and private concerns reduced their
staffs. There was widespread unemployment — a new phenomenon in Latin
America — followed by labour unrest, rioting and political revolts.
During 1930 and 1931 eleven of the twenty Latin-American republics
experienced revolution ; or, more accurately, experienced irregular changes
of government; for these outbreaks were alike not only in their success,
but, in most instances, in their relatively bloodless character. In some count-
ries criminal proceedings were started against outgoing rulers — Leguia
died in prison — but there were few assassinations or massacres. In general
the revolutions took the civilised but extra-legal course of demonstration
— ultimatum — resignation. It would be an over-simplification to attribute
the outbreaks entirely to the depression. Bad business helped to make
bad government intolerable. In every case there already existed social
and political grievances to which the depression gave an opening. The
commonest complaints were dictatorship, real or alleged, in some states;
radicalism and pampering of labour in others; over-liberal terms offered
to foreign capitalists; administrative waste and corruption; and the peren-
nial grudge of the ‘Outs’ against the ‘Ins’.
In Argentina the administration of Irigoyen was disliked by conserva-
tives for its radicalism and by almost everybody else for its personal
character, which concentrated a totally unmanageable mass of administra-
tive detail in the hands of an upright but self-willed and narrow septua-
genarian. It was not a dictatorship, but a creeping paralysis of administra-
tion, against which resentment grew. Irigoyen had forfeited labour support
by an uncompromising attitude towards strikes in 1930. In September
of that year an immense but well-organised and orderly demonstration
in Buenos Aires compelled Irigoyen to resign. The demonstration was
staged by students and the military. Its immediate consequence was a
year of military rule under General Uriburu. An election was eventually
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held late in 1931, and General Justo took office as the head of an elected
National Democratic — that is, conservative — government. The times were
unpropitious for a conservative policy in the ordinary sense, and govern-
ment tended to drift away from constitutional practice towards oligarchic
rule of the old type. Finally, during the second world war, the oligarchy
was displaced by a regime which bore at least a superficial resemblance
to European fascism.
The revolution in Argentina was followed six weeks later by a widespread
insurrection in Brazil. The coffee industry of Brazil had for some time
been controlled by a valorisation scheme under which the government
restricted the amount of production, bought the crop, stored it, and
released quantities appropriate to the demand, in order to maintain the
price. The scheme broke down inevitably and disastrously early in 1930,
and the only way of disposing of vast quantities of unsaleable coffee was
to bum it. To the resulting discontent the reigning President, Washington
Luis of Sao Paulo, added a political grievance by giving official support to
a Paulista candidate in the presidential election of 1930. As was custom-
ary in Brazilian elections, the official candidate was returned, and the
conduct of the election gave great offence in Minas Geraes, the state
which would have provided the next President according to long-standing
political convention. The situation, with its threat of permanent Paulista
government, was seized and exploited by the candidate of a third state,
Rio Grande do Sul, which had been growing in wealth and population
and now claimed a greater share in central government. Dr Getulio
Vargas embarked upon civil war supported by Minas Geraes as well as
by his own state of Rio Grande, defeated the forces of Sao Paulo, drove
out the President, and set up a form of modified dictatorship, bolstered
by two extensive constitutional changes designed to strengthen the power
of the President and to reduce that of Congress and the state govern-
ments. The second of these enactments, in 1937, inaugurated a ‘corpora-
tive’ organisation reminiscent of fascist Italy; but Vargas was no Musso-
lini. His rule, though centralised and authoritarian, was neither arbitrary
nor — except in dealing with revolts by alleged Communists — repressive.
He himself displayed an engaging geniality and studied moderation. The
great emperor Pedro II used to call himself the best republican in Brazil ;
Dr Vargas might similarly have said that, had he not the misfortune to
be a dictator, he would have been a very democratic fellow.
The revolution in Chile was exceptional in being a successful revolt
against military dictatorship. Chile probably suffered more severely than
any other country from the depression ; its export trade, already depressed,
was for a time almost killed. Yet the Chileans, remote, poor, proud,
eminently civilised, selected the inauspicious year 1932 for a return to
constitutional government. The President inaugurated in that year, after
two disputed elections and considerable disorder, was again Alessandri,
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liberal, upright and able, by far the most respected of Chilean statesmen.
He governed for six years of modest recovery and careful administration,
moving steadily away from his old radicalism towards a conventionally
conservative policy. In his last years he adopted measures of active re-
pression against socialists and Communists, which drove them to compose
their differences and join with the radicals in a joint election campaign.
Alessandri was thus succeeded in 1938 by Aguirre Cerda at the head of a
‘popular front’ coalition — itself a new and disturbing portent in Latin-
American politics.
In Mexico there was no revolution in the ordinary sense. Mexicans
considered that their country had been undergoing a continuous revolu-
tion since 1910. In the ’twenties, however, the process had slowed down.
The old revolutionaries had become the new conservatives, and except
for their anti-clericalism had forgotten much of the revolutionary pro-
gramme. Obregon’s successor, Calles, who either as President or as a
power behind the President dominated Mexican politics from 1924 to
1934, publicly announced his opinion in 1929 that the land reform pro-
gramme had gone far enough. In the early ’thirties distribution almost
ceased. It is true that the industrial labour laws grew somewhat beyond
what industry could safely afford; but the labour movement, like the
government, was susceptible to jobbery, and trade union leadership
became a road to affluence and power. Meanwhile there had been several
armed revolts in the ’twenties, and the gun-toting tradition of Mexican
politics was still alive. The general political tone of this phase of the
Revolution is best expressed in the nickname given to Calles. He was
called the Jefe Maximo — the Big Boss. Yet even in these circumstances
the emotions supporting the Revolution were too ardent to be chilled by
the economic blizzard from abroad. The depression produced not counter-
revolution, but impatience with the slow progress of the Revolution. With
the election of General Cardenas to the presidency in 1934 the scene
changed abruptly. During his six years of office most landowners pos-
sessing any considerable extent of good arable land were dispossessed
of all but a small area. The expropriation was no longer confined to
owners who had acquired land by illegal means, who farmed inefficiently,
or who had given political offence. The mere size of an estate, and its
proximity to a village which wanted land, was enough to justify seizure,
and it became much more difficult to stave off expropriation by the pay-
ment of bribes. Forty-seven million acres of land were distributed among
more than a million peasant families between 1936 and 1940, compared
with some 20 million acres granted to three-quarters of a million in the
previous twenty years. 1 Cardenas’s policy, much influenced by some aspects
of Communism (Trotsky found asylum in Mexico), favoured the grant of
1 P. E. James, Latin America (London, Cassell, 1943), p. 602. Detailed tables are col-
lected in N. L. Whetton, Rural Mexico (Chicago, 1948).
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ejidos to villages in common, rather than of plots in permanent owner-
ship to individuals, who often used their plots to produce crops for
immediate subsistence, and nothing more. The hasty redistribution,
necessarily based on inadequate surveys, caused widespread disorganisa-
tion and, temporarily at least, a serious drop in production. The develop-
ment of communal peasant farming posed urgent problems of capital and
management. A land bank system was started to lend money to ejidatarios;
but the collection of interest in small sums from many scattered borrowers
required an elaborate and costly organisation, and the operations of the
bank were mostly confined to promising villages in favoured localities.
The management problem was even more difficult of solution. Few
peones had experience of management, and, since ejido managers were
elected, they were often chosen on grounds of personal popularity rather
than of business ability. Nevertheless, some villages, particularly in the
now celebrated Laguna cotton-growing district, achieved considerable
success under the new system. It was confidently hoped that the problems
of leadership would prove easier of solution, as the determined efforts of
government to provide general education began to bear fruit. Meanwhile,
the price of revolution had to be paid in high cost of living, shaky national
credit, and uncertainty.
The revolution was avowedly nationalist as well as agrarian. One of the
most spectacular acts of the Cardenas administration was the expropria-
tion of the foreign oil companies in 1938, on terms of compensation which
could only be called derisory. A move to achieve native control of so
important a resource was understandable ; but again a price had to be paid,
in foreign, especially British, resentment, and in the temporary deteriora-
tion of the industry. Whether through inexperienced management, or
intractable labour, or lack of capital for exploratory work, productivity
declined for a decade after expropriation. During the second world war it
became impossible even to import the necessary machinery for replace-
ment, much less for development. Significant recovery did not begin until
the early 1950s.
The nationalism of the revolution was more than economic. The
plunder of the hacendados weakened and disrupted the cultivated social
and intellectual life, urban in character, French in tone, which their wealth
had supported. In the realm of the arts, a new and remarkable cultural
development came to take its place, self-consciously indigenous, based
largely upon Indian artistic tradition. Native Mexican art of the time was
most vigorous in the fields of painting and sculpture, less vigorous in
literary work. It was closely and grimly preoccupied with immediate
social problems, and this preoccupation set limits to its scope and its
appeal ; but it represented genuine and original creative effort, and seemed
a presage of the growth of intellectual independence which Latin America
as a whole urgently needed.
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To carry through the drastic changes of the ’thirties more than ordinary
powers were needed, and President Cardenas, supported by the army, in-
dustrial labour and the peasantry, was virtually a dictator. There was only
one political party, the party of the Mexican Revolution. The dictator-
ship, however, was one of creative enthusiasm rather than of repression.
Except in its persecution of the church and its ruthless invasion of property,
it was tolerant of divergences of opinion and permitted outspoken public
criticism of its policy. Most significant of all, when Cardenas’s term
came to an end he attempted neither to seek re-election nor to evade the
constitution by interfering in the administration of his successor.
Most Latin-American states in the 1930s showed a marked tendency
to adopt more authoritarian forms of government. These forms could not
fairly be called ‘totalitarian’; most educated Latin Americans possessed
too strong a sense of personal dignity to tolerate extreme dictatorship
and too keen a sense of ridicule to be deceived by the cruder forms of
racial myth. Governments, moreover, lacked the detailed administrative
machinery which the ‘ totalitarian’ state requires. There was, nevertheless,
a very evident growth of self-conscious nationalism. In internal affairs it
took the form of agitation and sometimes of financial discrimination
against foreign capital — against the English railways in Argentina, against
the nitrate concerns in Chile, and of course the oil companies in Mexico.
Many of these undertakings had become notoriously unremunerative, and
clearly the great days of foreign — or at least European — investment in
Latin America were past. In some countries, legislation intended for the
protection of labour was used as a means of discrimination against foreign
employers. Most governments enacted anti-alien employment laws, limit-
ing the number of foreigners who might be employed in industry or
commerce. At the same time, the open-door immigration policy which
had existed over most of Latin America came to an end. Restrictive
legislation began in Brazil and on the Pacific coast with quota regulations
aimed against the immigration of Japanese, who presented a difficult
problem of assimilation and were generally disliked; but most govern-
ments wished also to protect the industrial and agricultural labour market,
in a time of unemployment, against an influx of European wage-earners.
In Argentina and Brazil, the principal immigration countries, restrictive
legislation reached a peak of severity in i938.Both countries still contained
immense areas of empty land, and exceptions were made in favour of
farming settlers; but few immigrants in the 1930s were of this class.
Pioneer settlement was — and still is — hampered by lack of capital. Today
there is little prospect in any part of Latin America of a revival of indis-
criminate mass immigration.
Throughout Latin America renewed and strenuous efforts were made,
particularly in developing industries, to achieve a greater degree of eco-
nomic independence. Governments attempted to control the production
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of staple products — Brazilian coffee, Argentine wheat, Chilean nitrate,
Bolivian tin — in the hope of maintaining prices. In foreign trade, barter
agreements between governments began to replace the competition of
the open market. Prominent among these was the Roca-Runciman agree-
ment between Argentina and Great Britain in 1933, followed by other
similar pacts which, whatever their economic justification, caused con-
siderable resentment in the United States. Nationalism also took overt
political forms. There were several acrimonious disputes between states,
and one serious war between Paraguay and Bolivia over possession of the
Gran Chaco. Bolivia, landlocked and disorderly, dependent for revenue
upon the product of its foreign-owned tin mines, was defeated and suffered
yet another loss of territory. Bolivian irridentism would, no doubt, have
been a menace to the peace, but for Bolivian weakness. The resources of
the country were further strained later, in the early 1950s, by a revolu-
tion of Mexican type which distributed the land of the big estates, armed
the tin miners and nationalised the mines.
Nationalism, however, was clearly no panacea for Latin-American diffi-
culties, and most governments knew and admitted that autarky, even if
desirable, was out of the question in any foreseeable future. In many
countries — though not in all — the 1930s saw a striking growth of enthusi-
asm for the Pan-American idea, and an elaboration of Pan-American
arrangements for meeting and discussion. To some extent this was due to
the decline in the prestige of the League of Nations, to Latin-American
disappointment with the League’s achievements, and disinclination to
become involved in European quarrels which seemed to be passing beyond
the scope of international discussion. In great measure, however, the
revival of Pan-Americanism was assisted by changes in the foreign policy
of the United States.
The Union of American Republics is an entirely voluntary association
of theoretically equal sovereign states. It has no centralised administra-
tion and no constitution; few of its organs rest on formal conventions.
Since 1910 it has maintained a permanent Bureau at Washington, which
is a centre of research and propaganda as well as a secretariat for the
periodical Pan-American conferences. The chief function of the Union is
to facilitate the open discussion of matters of common interest to the
American republics. The United States has always been the Union’s chief
sponsor; the chief obstacle to the work of the Union has been Latin-
American suspicion of the United States. Many North American states-
men, notably Woodrow Wilson, insistently proclaimed their country’s
respect for the sovereignty of all its neighbours. These pronouncements
appeared to be contradicted by the interventions in Mexico in 1914 and
1916-17, followed by a decade of uniformly bad relations; by the presence
of United States forces — however few in number and helpful in intention
— in Haiti, Santo Domingo and Nicaragua; by the Platt amendment;
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by the non-recognition policy; by the economic power exercised in Cuba
by the sugar corporations, and throughout the Caribbean by the United
Fruit Company, an organisation far wealthier and more potent than the
little republics in which it operated.
After the first world war it was generally thought that the strategic
excuse for North American intervention in the Caribbean had disappeared.
Resentment against the political and economic policy of the United States
flared up in public speeches at the Havana Conference in 1928. The hos-
tility then displayed gave a considerable shock to public opinion in the
United States, and the year of the Conference saw the beginnings of a
determined effort to improve relations with Latin America. The policy of
the ‘good neighbour’ is closely associated with the name of Franklin
Roosevelt. He was not responsible for the Clark memorandum, published
in 1930, which explicitly repudiated the ‘ Roosevelt corollary’; nor for the
appointment of Dwight Morrow, who as ambassador in Mexico did
much to create friendly feeling and to postpone the Mexican onslaught
on foreign property. The new policy reached its fullest expression, how-
ever, after Roosevelt became President in 1933. In that year, at the seventh
Pan-American Conference at Montevideo, the United States accepted a
resolution denying the right of any state to interfere in the internal affairs
of any other state. The Buenos Aires Conference in 1936, which was
opened by President Roosevelt himself, reaffirmed this principle in more
explicit terms, and drew up a pact providing for consultation in the event
of any threat to the peace of the Americas. The administrative organisa-
tion and procedure for carrying out this consultative pact were created
by the eighth Pan-American Conference at Lima in 1938.
During this period of frequent conferences the United States govern-
ment withdrew the last of its forces from Nicaragua and Haiti, rescinded
the Platt amendment in 1934, and in 1936 voluntarily gave up its treaty
right of intervention in Panama. Evidence of a radical change of policy
was afforded not only by the actions of the State Department, but by
its abstentions from action. North American investors abroad were left
to shift for themselves. There was no intervention in Cuba during the
anarchy of Grau San Martin’s administration, and, when the Mexican
government confiscated the foreign oil wells, the British Foreign Office
was left alone to make futile protests and to break off diplomatic relations.
Meanwhile a new and more liberal trading policy, initiated by Mr Cordell
Hull under the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, found an
effective sphere of operation in Latin America. By the end of 1939 agree-
ments had been made with eleven Latin-American states.
The success of the ‘good neighbour’ policy was not universal. The
Buenos Aires Conference, for instance, resolutely refused to endorse the
neutrality legislation of the United States. There were sharp differences
of opinion between Argentina and the United States over the procedure
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to be adopted to bring the Chaco war to an end, and over Argentine
proposals for non-aggression pacts in which European states might be
invited to participate. Not only were Argentine governments jealous of
North American political leadership : the Argentine economy was com-
plementary to that of Europe and directly competitive with that of the
United States. Argentina today easily holds a record among American
states for the non-ratification of international agreements.
Nevertheless, the Pan-American movement grew in strength, and its
value became evident in 1939. Within three weeks of the outbreak of war
the American foreign ministers met to establish a ‘zone of neutrality’
in the Americas and to set up a financial and economic advisory commit-
tee designed to reduce the economic consequences of the war in Latin
America. In 1940, the emphasis having shifted from neutrality to defence,
they met again at Havana, and devised a scheme for taking over the ad-
ministration of European colonies in the western hemisphere in case of
German victory in Europe. The Havana Conference also passed a resolu-
tion declaring that any attack by a non-American state would be con-
sidered an act of aggression against all the Americas.
An act of aggression against the United States took place towards the
end of 1941, and early in 1942 the American foreign ministers met again,
at Rio de Janeiro. This meeting — after a severe struggle in which Argen-
tina led the opposition— recommended all American republics to sever
relations with the ‘Axis’ powers. The co-operation of Latin America was
now vital to the Allied cause, since the Japanese had possessed themselves
of the chief sources, in the East, of tin, rubber, quinine, and a whole range
of tropical products. The Latin-American states rose to the occasion.
Mexico and Brazil declared war in the summer of 1942. Both in due
course sent forces abroad. All the republics except Chile and Argentina
broke off relations with the ‘Axis’ before the end of the Conference.
Chile made the break in January 1943. Argentina broke off relations in
1944 and declared war in January 1945, obviously with a view to securing
a place at the United Nations Conference. By that time Argentina was
almost isolated politically, and its relations with the United States were
deeply embittered. Argentina was not represented at the fourth con-
ference of foreign ministers in 1945, but it eventually acceded to the final
Act of Chapultepec. This Act repeated the principle of common American
resistance to aggression, and made it clear that the principle was to include
aggression by one American state against another. Further, it provided
for the first time a working definition of aggression, and committed states,
if necessary, to the use of economic and military ‘sanctions’. The Act
of Chapultepec thus marked, on paper, the metamorphosis of the Monroe
Doctrine from a unilateral declaration of policy to a reciprocal system of
regional security, within the proposed framework of the United Nations.
The strength and permanence of this system depended to a great extent
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upon the policy of the United States. The successes of the ‘ good neighbour ’
policy were achieved through the readiness of the United States to exer-
cise exceptional restraint, and to make important concessions of immedi-
ate interests. There was still, however, considerable latent hostility
towards the United States in Latin America. It broke briefly into clamour
in Peru and Ecuador during the war, over the North American attitude
towards a dispute between those countries about territory on the Upper
Amazon. After the war most Latin-American states recognised, realistic-
ally if grudgingly, their dependence upon the United States for the general
defence of the Americas against outside attack. The United States govern-
ment, on its side, took great care to avoid open interference in the internal
affairs of other American states. These attitudes and policies were enough
to avert open hostility, if not to secure friendly co-operation. Non-
intervention, however, was uneasily felt to be contingent, from the North
American point of view, on good behaviour. It could hardly be maintained
if, for instance, there should be a widespread development in Latin
America of pro-Russian Communism.
At the time such a possibility seemed comparatively remote. Communist
groups existed in most of the republics; they were often, and sometimes
rightly, blamed for fomenting conspiracy and disorder ; but they were small
and relatively unimportant. It is true that the thought of the Mexican
revolution owed much to Marx, but agrarismo was a Mexican phenomenon
and had little in common with contemporary Russian totalitarianism.
Indeed, both the theories and the policies of the revolutionary party in
power in Mexico had become much less drastic, much more conservative,
in the 1940s than they had been a decade earlier. Devices were found for
avoiding the laws against concentrated estates, and no obstacles were
placed in the way of the development of industry by private capital. APRA,
the interesting left-wing party which came into power in Peru at the
election of 1945, followed a similar route, though more briefly and much
less effectively. Aprismo purported to be Marxist in political and social
philosophy, but it recognised the importance of religion in social life, and
accepted the need for the support of the middle class in the reform of
society. It was strongly opposed to the influence of foreign capital, sup-
ported the idea of Pan-Latin-Americanism, and stressed the importance
of the Indian races in American affairs. Its programme identified the most
pressing task of any Peruvian government — that of bringing a dispossessed
and poverty-stricken Indian peasantry into the main stream of national
economic life. The APRA government achieved little; it was overthrown
late in 1948, by a military insurrection which had widespread support
among the employing and landowning classes. The soldiers and their
allies thought, or affected to think, that Aprismo was dangerously close to
Communism; but in fact APRA had moved steadily to the right during its
period of office, and continued to do so after its overthrow. Ineffectual it
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may have been; it was not seriously revolutionary. Its political character-
istics — a combination between the middle and professional classes and
labour, and a tendency to move to the right when under pressure — were
common to many moderate radical movements in Latin America, and a
number of successful post-war governments were based on coalitions of
this kind. Communism, which would not as a rule accept such a coalition,
remained politically weak, though discontents of the kind on which it
could thrive were widespread almost everywhere.
One of the major states of Latin America was until 1955 governed by a
radical dictatorship of a fairly extreme kind. Argentina resembles Austra-
lia in that, although its wealth comes from its immense rural resources,
three-quarters of its population live in towns. Immigrants have always
tended to seek employment in or near the towns, and urbanisation was
accelerated by industrial development before and during the war. One-
fifth of the population live in the capital. During the war, through the
greatly increased demands for industrial production, especially (as in 1914)
for tinned beef, labour in Buenos Aires received very high wages and
became very powerful. After the war, with the falling-off of temporary
demands and the attempt to resume normal pre-war trading, the labour in
the canning factories and other concerns became extremely unruly.
General Peron came to power as a result of a military coup in 1943 and
a tumultuous election in 1945. His strength rested upon labour and the
army, and was due to his gift of talking to the workers of the capital in
language which they understood — simple, emotional and violent. His
theme was an extreme left-wing nationalism, a promise to lead the wor-
kers against the capitalist and the foreigner. His success in 1945 was
probably assisted by the attempts of the United States Ambassador in
Buenos Aires, Mr Spruille Braden, to rally opposition against him. This
helped to explain the attitude of the government towards the United
States. Unwillingness to compromise hindered trade negotiations with
other states, notably Great Britain. National feeling insisted on the pur-
chase in 1947 of the very unremunerative English railways — el pulpo
ingles, the English octopus, as they were called in the Peronista press.
The failure of the meat companies to deliver the beef which was to pay
for the railways was due, not so much to ill-will or bad faith, as to labour
trouble and general disorganisation in the trade. The economic life of
Argentina was, indeed, in some disorder in 1949, despite its great potenti-
alities.
Dictatorships of the Peronista kind remained rare in Latin America, at
least in the greater states. In Mexico the revolution had lost its fierce
urgency and constitutional government seemed firmly established. In
Brazil the Vargas administration ended in 1945, and President Dutra
correctly described his own government as one devoted to ‘re-constitu-
tionalising’ the political system. Chile and Uruguay each already enjoyed
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a long tradition of political stability. Over a great part of the area, therefore,
the argument, so often advanced, that the economic difficulties of Latin
America arose from the instability of Latin-American governments,
seemed to have lost any force it might once have had. In the strictly
economic field, major changes appeared to be on the way. The second
world war, with its temporarily expanded demand for raw materials,
especially minerals, and its curtailment of the supply of manufactured
goods, had given a powerful stimulus to industrial development of the
import-substitution kind. The process continued, under high protection,
in peace-time. Heavy industry also made a beginning in Brazil, in Mexico
and in Peru. In Brazil the building of the great Volta Redonda steel-
works was hailed as a declaration of economic independence. Yet to assert,
as some Latin- Americans did, that South America in 1950 was on the
threshold of a development analogous to that of North America in the
second half of the last century, was premature, to say the least. The whole
area faced appalling difficulties. Many of the new import-substitution
industries proved uneconomic in peace-time. Their products could not be
sold abroad, and national markets were too small to absorb them.
Agriculture in many sectors was neglected, technically backward, and
stagnant. It lacked stimulus; for the world demand for primary products
in peace was sluggish, compared with that for manufactured goods. New
countries in Africa and elsewhere were emerging, moreover, as competitive
producers of the export crops upon which Latin America had long relied.
The area as a whole had never really recovered from the depression of the
late 1920s. In 1932 the exports of Latin America to the rest of the world
were less than half what they had been in 1928; and, while world trade
thereafter recovered, Latin-American exports, in real terms, virtually stood
still. The Latin-American share of world trade, expressed as a percentage,
declined steadily from 1935 to 1940; rose from 1940 to 1945 in response to
demand for raw materials; and again declined from 1945 to 1950. 1
The economic history of Latin America from 1930 to 1950, therefore,
apart from the war years, had been one long continuous slump. Yet
population was increasing by leaps and bounds, more rapidly, indeed,
than in any other comparable area in the world. Unemployment was
general in many countries, and became more apparent as hundreds of
thousands of people migrated from the poverty-stricken countryside to
the shanty-town slums of the big cities. The extent and speed of in-
dustrialisation needed to meet such a situation could not even be at-
tempted, without foreign capital investment and foreign credit on an
immense scale. These were not forthcoming. The only Latin-American
countries which were able to earn foreign exchange in any considerable
amounts were Venezuela, from oil, Mexico, from ‘tourism’, and Panama,
1 The Economic Development of Latin America in the Post-War Period (United Nations,
Economic Commission for Latin America, New York, 1964).
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from the Canal. Significantly, these were the only Latin-American coun-
tries which combined — and still combine — a relatively high per capita
income (by Latin-American standards) with a low annual rate of price
inflation. Other countries either stagnated economically, or else pushed
ahead with imaginative industrial schemes and ambitious public works to
the accompaniment — as in Brazil — of ruinous inflation and consequent
widespread distress. Of all the poorer areas of the world, Latin America
in 1950 was the most literate, the most sophisticated in its leadership, the
most evidently ‘ripe’ for rapid economic growth; yet of its major states
probably only Mexico in 1950 showed any clear sign of such growth
beginning. Latin America represented beyond question a political and
cultural force, and a social and economic problem, which the world at
large could not afford to ignore.
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CHAPTER XX
LITERATURE 1895-1939
I n 1895 Jude the Obscure was published, Hardy’s last, and perhaps his
greatest, novel. It was promptly reviled by a majority of reviewers on
both sides of the Atlantic, and burnt by a bishop, ‘probably in his
despair’, Hardy suggested later, ‘at not being able to bum me’; by so
much had progress eroded the fervours of faith. The only long-term effect
on the author, as Hardy also revealed, was that of ‘ completely curing ’ him
‘of further interest in novel writing’. Fortunately it did not also cure him
of the habit of poetry; and, meanwhile, Jude seems an excellent place to
start.
In certain obvious ways, it is very modem; its treatment of human
sexuality is more frank, if not necessarily more realistic, than one finds in
any previous important English novel. The claims for naturalism made by
Flaubert, Zola, Ibsen and other European writers were at last influencing
the British tradition, as they might have done much earlier had it not been
for the excessive public prudery of Victorian taste. But, like nearly all
major novels, Jude is not primarily naturalistic. Its total impact has more
the force of myth. To Hardy, as to many other progressive Victorians,
modem life had come to seem a tragic affair. Jude and Sue pursue the
romantic quest for self-fulfilment, but the very nature of things conspires
against them. Certain of the sufferings arise, it is true, from social causes
that might be alleviated; though Jude himself is rejected in his search for
education, no laws of nature decree this fate. The gates of Oxford are fast
shut, but the ‘red-brick’ colleges were rising. Forster’s Education Act
(1870) had removed many obstacles, and a Jude fifty years later would
have found fewer frustrations of this kind. Again, Jude’s sexual prob-
lems might have been less insoluble in the future. He might have found
himself less fatally tom between two women representing so exclu-
sively the one the bodily, the other the spiritual and intellectual, side of
life — the earthy, coarse, good-natured, shrewd, uneducable Arabella, and
the refined, well-meaning, incurably neurotic and destructive Sue.
But, when this is said, certain aspects of Hardy’s tragic context still
seem beyond a solution, including perhaps the sexual make-up of Jude
and Sue. There is Jude’s strong animal instinct which delivers him —
healthily, some critics have felt — to Arabella’s coarser world. There is
Sue’s strangely tormented nature, which seems destined to destroy those
who love her and whom she loves. Above all, there is the degree of sensi-
tivity in Jude and Sue, which can scarcely expect peace in a suffering
world. Almost, Hardy seems to be suggesting, Jude and Sue are in an
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evolutionary cul-de-sac ; such heightened sensitivity as theirs weakens the
will to survive. Arabella is the one who will survive, whatever life offers,
with her resilience in the face of suffering, her robust acceptance of the
world as it is. But the evolution of higher sensitivity and intelligence
begins to seem a dubious blessing. The man who suffers for worms and
for rabbits may be destined to perish, a freak in our Darwinian, post-
Christian world.
This perception hovers on the background, also, of Henry James’s
late novels — a roll-call of masterpieces as distinguished as any one could
find: What Maisie Knew (1897), The Spoils of Poynton ( 1 897), The Awkward
Age (1899), The Sacred Fount (1901), The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1905). Through all these
works one finds two deep, but ironically incompatible, insights. Intelligent,
sensitive man needs, and must seek, a rich destiny — a destiny conceived,
moreover, through personal relationships raised to the beauty of art. Yet
personal relationships, even and perhaps especially when most sensitively
cultivated, are characterised by ambivalence, and vulnerable to betrayal
and death. The later James novels are masterpieces of subtlety, so rich
that some readers have been repelled. Is the subtlety, they wonder, simply
endless manner— manner calculated to add grace and interest to actually
threadbare and sordid events? Yet James’s achieved effect is virtually the
opposite. He shows that certain people who might easily be dismissed as
threadbare or sordid by a casual spectator may be living out intense
dramas of heightened awareness but almost paralysed will. The Wings of
the Dove sounds threadbare only if it is reduced to a naked plot level, and
seen as the tale of two villains scheming for the money of a dying friend. In
fact the leading villain on this reading, Kate Croy, represents ‘life’ even
more strikingly than Millie Theale, her ‘victim’; for, whereas Millie,
despite her great love of life, is left merely to die exquisitely, Kate, if given
Millie’s money (which she certainly schemes for), could marvellously and
richly five. The quality of ‘life’ is indeed James’s central preoccupation,
and, alongside it, the complications and corruptions which a society
based on money and privilege must inevitably bring. The simpler moral
judgements are, of course, present, and there is an important sense in
which they remain true. Kate Croy herself, and her rich, domineering aunt
Mrs Lowder, use and exploit people, and this is a cardinal Jamesian sin.
Millie represents the exquisite delicacy which respects individuality and
seems fulfilled in self-sacrifice, and this comes near to the Jamesian ideal.
Merton Densher, again, is the kind of good-looking, well-intentioned,
weak-willed young man who can be led unwittingly into a sordid plot
through passion, but then incapacitated for the plot by a supremely
magnanimous act of his intended prey; and this is an image of modem
man to which James often returns. Teasing ambiguities make of James’s
later novels one of the supreme literary experiences, but, if a single aspect
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of The Wings of the Dove may be isolated for this present thesis, it is an
insight that might remind us of Jude the Obscure. Kate and Mrs Lowder
will survive and live lavishly, in their confident coarseness, while Millie
and Merton Densher will not. The novel ends with Kate hurt but Millie
dead, and Merton paralysed : even if sensitivity and conscience have the
highest potential for life (and James showed this also in The Spoils of
Poynton), it is people with great exuberance but a diminished conscience
who are most likely actually to live. The modem world, if one can risk yet
a further simplification, rewards heightened consciousness with heightened
pain.
James’s later novels were attacked by E. M. Forster for their stylistic
density, but many of their values seem to be carried over into his own.
His first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) was followed by The
Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howard's End
(1910), and then years later by the last and greatest, A Passage to India
(1924). Forster’s novels are not without their ironic ambivalences, but
characteristically he mediates these through a symbolism more explicit, if
somewhat less resonant, than James’s. Forster is a liberal humanist who
continues to cherish his own moral values, whilst exploring their limitations
in situations of choice and action so ironically that one comes to doubt
their survival value in the modern world. Even democracy is afforded only
two cheers, in its battles with tyranny; the best of a bad job, yes, says
Forster, but no shining ideal. And his liberal heroes and heroines, who
set out to ‘connect’ with their fellow men in humane benevolence, to
transcend in art and friendship the sordid man-made barriers of class,
colour and creed — these too are endorsed for their ideals and benevolence,
but doomed by their frequent defects in elementary good sense.
In Howard's End, the story concerns two German sisters, Margaret and
Helen Schlegel, who embody an enthusiastic liberal humanism, and con-
front the world with high hopes of setting it to rights. When they meet the
wealthy and materialistic Wilcoxes, both sisters, after Helen’s initial
infatuation, are contemptuous ; yet the Wilcox world of class gradations
and business efficiency, of ‘telegrams and anger’, of sumptuous vulgarity
with panic and emptiness somewhere just under the surface, is not to be
simply derided as anti-cultural or ‘anti-life’. Both sisters are themselves
rich, and in the course of the novel they begin to understand the implica-
tions of their wealth. Confronted with the unfortunate Leonard Bast, a
young man struggling with poverty and a tawdry marriage, and cut off
by these things from the ‘ culture ’ to which he so desperately aspires, they
realise how greatly their own commitment to art and to personal relation-
ships depends upon the leisure of a privileged class. Their personal free-
dom is secured by investments, and these are produced and sustained by
the Wilcoxes of the world, not by the Schlegels. There is a suggestion,
even, that the liberal and artistic Schlegels may be parasitic upon the very
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people whose material wealth they instinctively deride. In the novel, the
two sisters take very different paths, which symbolise their individual
reactions to this discovery. Margaret marries Mr Wilcox, and attempts a
via media ; perhaps she can ‘soften’ his way of life (but soften it without
undermining it, one wonders?) whilst going fully half-way towards
recognising its central validity in the modem world. Her marriage works,
however, only fitfully and at low pressure; though allowances are made on
both sides, and there is genuine friendship, the relationship is ill fitted to
survive a moral crisis of the kind which Helen eventually precipitates.
For Helen, refusing all compromise, rejects the Wilcoxes completely, and
concentrates upon trying to make Bast the actual cultural equal of herself.
The practical obstacles to this are underlined throughout the novel, with
Forster’s unfailing comic inventiveness. Eventually, perhaps in pity and
desperation, though we are not fully shown this, Helen gives to Bast the
gift of herself. The only ‘connection’ which will finally satisfy the appetite
of her idealism for social realisation is the physical connection of sex.
Some critics have seen in this a triumph of symbolism over psychological
probability, but a woman like Helen, fiercely idealistic and fiercely in-
tolerant of cant, might understandably drive her own sincerity to this
supreme test. In giving herself to Bast, however, and conceiving his child,
Helen produces merely a social disaster, in which her sister’s marriage is
tested almost to breaking-point, and Bast himself, in a typically ludicrous
accident, is destroyed. The novel ends with ambiguities which, though
more clearly defined than James’s, avoid schematic simplicity. Though the
Schlegels themselves are involved in muddle, and their ideals are forced
by events towards Margaret’s compromise and Helen’s catastrophe, the
next generation might still benefit from what they have done. The child of
Bast and Helen will be the inheritor of Howard’s End— -once the home of
the gentle, withdrawn first Mrs Wilcox, who represented so much of what
was gracious and intuitive in the older England.
So Forster looks ahead, to the erosion of class-consciousness through
democratic progress, perhaps (if one can use hindsight) to the welfare
state. And in his later novel, A Passage to India , he again shows the
liberal attempt to ‘connect’ Indians and Anglo-Indians across social
pressures and barriers failing in the first generation, but holding some hope
for future time. Since Forster’s prevailing mode is comic rather than
tragic, one is entitled to feel a certain optimism behind the gloom — an
optimism partly justified, it may be, by the welfare and Indian legislation
of Clement Attlee’s post- 1945 Labour government. Yet one feels, too,
as one often does when reading Hardy and James, Forster’s conviction of
certain losses which time will never heal. Like most liberal humanists of
the early twentieth century, he was aware of accelerating social changes,
which must destroy much that was fine and serene in the old order,
whether they also remedy the older evils or not. He was no longer able to
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entertain the full Arnoldian hope, attempted in Margaret’s marriage to
Mr Wilcox, of a middle class raised from philistinism to culture; still less
could he foresee Arnold's ‘raw, unkindled masses of humanity’ trans-
formed by decent wages and education into sweetness and light. Already,
in Forster’s writings, one detects certain characteristics that were later to
be associated with Bloomsbury — an urbane and aristocratic irony, more
conscious of its own precarious hold upon history than confident of its
power to change things ; a suggestion that the older humanism no longer
represents the main current of history, but has become a backwater, a
home for the dwindling elite.
The Edwardian novel would be distinguished if it could boast only
James and Forster. But there were two other major practitioners in the
mode, as it passed from its Victorian triumphs to a splendid late flowering.
Kipling was still producing some of his best work — The Second Jungle
Book (1895), Stalky & Co. (1899), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), They
(1905), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), The Brushwood Boy (1907), Actions and
Reactions (1909). And, though Kipling’s reputation suffered a decline in
his lifetime which lasted until comparatively recently, he is now being
appraised as a major figure again. For too long, he was taken simply as a
crude propagandist for imperial expansion, and discredited in the public
mind along with that. The sadistic elements in his work were pointed to,
but regarded as disabling ; he was not credited with the insight into cruelty
and violence which even the crudest post-Freudian writers are allowed to
possess. Yet, even at the height of the reaction, major critics like T. S.
Eliot, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trifling and C. S. Lewis
were fascinated by Kipling; they recognised the imaginative power, the
mythic intensity of his writing, even if they remained scornful of his ideas.
It has remained for more recent critics, and notably Noel Annan, to point
out that Kipling’s intellect is far more formidable than his critics have
supposed. 1 While Hardy, James, Forster all in their different ways ex-
plored the limitations of romantic humanism, Kipling rejected the tradi-
tion outright. It rested, in his view, on a fallacy. Men are not naturally
kindly and humane when freed from convention; their condition without
Law is the Hobbesian one, nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short. The
public school boy in the dormitory, the soldier in India, the ordinary
man in the street have their decencies, but decencies in permanent conflict
with instincts that need to be curbed. When Kipling speaks of the ‘lesser
breeds without the law’ he is not sneering, but reporting the truth as he
sees it. The Law is the condition for civilised living, the condition outside
which no man can hope to live in freedom. But is also positively a source of
discipline, especially when it is reinforced, as in a public school or an
army, by an astringent and testing mode of life. And, above all, it has
glamour. When translated into the convictions of a caste or a club, an
1 A. Rutherford (ed.), Kipling's Mind and Art (1964).
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‘ inside ’ community, a perceived and envied elite, it offers excitement and
self-respect by which to live. Kipling also saw, it seems, that men must
exercise their authority and extend their boundaries or start, imperceptibly
at first, to sink. In an individual life, as in empire, there is no standing still.
Ironically, it was precisely Kipling’s realism about the ordinary man
which alienated critics who prided themselves on their own realism about
sex. Certainly the blend of cruelty, vulgarity, courage and latent decency
which Kipling admires was unacceptable to those who took as axiomatic
the superiority of Millie Theale to Kate Croy. Kipling’s true position,
though well on the political right, was safely clear of fascism; Noel
Annan has suggested as immediate intellectual influences the European
sociologists Durkheim, Weber and Pareto ‘who revolutionised the study
of society at the beginning of this century’. Such pointers help to confirm
our feeling that the imaginative power of Kipling’s novels springs from
something more coherent than brash patriotism and unrecognised sadism.
The strange underestimate of them in the late 1940s and the 1950s may
come to seem as illuminating, in retrospect, of the retreat from empire, as
the wildly hysterical overestimate of D. H. Lawrence which accompanied it.
And it may be that, if Kipling’s popularity returns in the near future, this
will be not only because the British Empire needs its imaginative historian
now it is over, but also because the values of empire are not so very unlike
the values of economic survival: either one expands, says Kipling, or one
dies.
The other major British novelist of this period is Conrad, a lone wolf in
the English novel tradition. A Pole writing in a foreign language and
living in exile, he has yet become one of the classics of English art. His
first novel, Almayer's Folly, was published in 1895, and the next thirty
years saw, among other work, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Nigger of
the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1903), Nostromo (1904),
The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (191 1), Chance (1913),
Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917), The Rescue (1920), Suspense
(1925). It is a distinguishing feature of Conrad that he seldom writes
about the domestic and middle-class scenes and people which have been
so popular in English fiction. The relationship between the sexes, and even
normal family relationships, interested him little. His main preoccupation
seems to be with the moments when individuals are tested by circumstances,
and challenged in loneliness to survive. Again and again his heroes are
faced with the test of their manhood, either in actual storms and tempests
at sea, or in the storms and tempests of life. The challenge is to develop
courage and endurance, above all self-sufficiency, in a universe devoid of
purpose, yet offering certain achieved ideals of responsibility and courage
in the traditions of men. The heroic virtues become both the means of
victory, and their own best reward. Conrad views certain human institu-
tions, it seems, much as a Catholic views the Church. An individual sea-
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captain has to test himself against a role of high and proven courage; like
a priest, he pits his success or failure in life against an accepted succession,
of which he is part. Conrad has little time for the quest for personal fulfil-
ment outside such testing frameworks; he scorns the pursuit of emotional
satisfaction in a void. At times, he has seemed to some of his critics
chillingly clinical; it has been postulated even that cold dislike for his
characters might be the impetus of his art. But what more is such a view
than a patent evasion? — an evasion the sentimentality of which Conrad
would have been the first to detect.
In The Secret Agent , for instance, he depicts various paths that can
lead to political anarchy, for idealistic men and even for men of unusual
virtue, as well as for the evil and mad. And in Mrs Verloc he depicts a
path leading to murder, for a woman who seems to call aloud for the
understanding that also forgives. But Conrad himself can understand with-
out forgiving; how can one find an easy formula of forgiveness without
abdicating responsibility for what is actually done? It is true that he for-
bids us the luxury of simple condemnation, by depicting the good anarch-
ists, and Mrs Verloc, with the kind of imaginative perception which
kindles our fear. But equally he forbids us the luxury of armchair
tolerance, by focusing very clear attention upon their deeds. The under-
standing is that they are casualties in life, and must inevitably suffer; that
they are casualties dangerous, moreover, to the all-important order of
society as well as to themselves. One can agree that the quality of analysis
in such a novel is disturbingly astringent; but to call it ‘inhuman’ is to
refuse the full insights of the novelist’s art. Fortunately, Conrad has a
wonderful richness to offer, as well as his sternness ; the richness of per-
ceived possibilities of greatness and adventure in a tragic world.
Emerging from this necessarily brief commentary upon the Edwardian
novel, it is possible to point to at least one major common theme. All
four of the novelists touched on, as well as Hardy, illuminate our need to
cultivate endurance in the modem world. More and more, as Hardy
implied in The Return of the Native, men will come to see their predica-
ment mirrored not in the childhood quickness and curiosity of the ancient
world, nor in the joyful dreams and rituals of medieval adolescence, but in
the sombre, twilit glooms of Egdon Heath. Maturity has brought truth,
but truth disillusion; Comte’s Age of Positivism discovers few spiritual
consolations to balance the loss. The young Yeats was already singing
this theme in his early verses:
The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy ;
Of old the world on dreaming fed.
Grey Truth is now her painted toy. . .
Perhaps many other late Victorians, and Edwardians, were oppressed
with such reflections, when they perceived that inexorable Duty must live
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on in a world unnourished by hope. In a tragic world, one’s ideals must be
human; in the human world, the betrayal of ideals seems the true tragic
end. No wonder so many leading characters in fiction are left with only
their own integrity and tried powers of endurance, as destiny darkens
around them, and the world grows old.
One sees, indeed, how far these writers are from illustrating that mood
of sunlit euphoria, all blue skies, cricket flannels and honeysuckle, in
which the Edwardian innocents were once thought to have played. The
liberals were exploring their own weaknesses with heartrending irony,
while illiberals were robustly pushing their civilisation towards its col-
lapse. And most of the minor writers too — H. G. Wells notably, but by
no means solely — saw storm clouds of change and violence gathering over
the civilised world. The forces which were to dominate European literature
in the war years, and in the later years entre deux guerres, were already
shaping — the qualification or outright rejection of liberal humanism, in
Eliot, Hulme and a host of others; the perception that sensitive European
man might after all be a small elite, left high and dry by history, and not the
natural inheritor of the earth; the fear, so ironically reversing several cent-
uries of optimism, that man was losing control of his own inventions, and
might be doomed to be destroyed, like Frankenstein, by the monster he had
so presumptuously made; above all, the myth of the final collapse of
civilisation, ‘the waste land’, to which Eliot gave a central literary master-
piece as well as a name. In all these trends, one sees the political disturb-
ances of the period reflected in literature. There is ample evidence for the
view that such prolonged crises as the deteriorating relationship between
Britain and Germany, the battle between Lords and Commons, the Home
Rule crisis, the struggle for female suffrage, the growing alienation in
industry between management and unions, the mounting rumours of
international subversion and conspiracy, as well as the disturbing implica-
tions of new scientific inventions and changes, were profoundly influ-
encing the ways in which men thought and wrote.
The literary greatness of the late Victorian and the Edwardian periods
was in the novel, and it has seemed right to start from there. The poets
were still no match for their great European contemporaries, though the
fruitful influence of Baudelaire, Mallarme and Laforgue might already be
traced. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were some new
and talented English poets, but only one genius. That was Hardy, who
transformed himself with unparalleled versatility from a great novelist of
one century into a great poet of the next. Hardy had written poems before,
including some very fine ones, but his really memorable poems were
written soon after the death of his wife, Emma, in 1912. When Emma
died, he was released from the oppressive failure of his marriage into the
most poignant memories of first love. Poems such as After a Journey, and
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the one quoted here, express the agony of bereavement as purely and
movingly as poetry has ever done:
The Shadow on the Stone
I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing.
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.
I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.
Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade.
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition —
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
The only comparable achievement of British art in the period is Elgar’s.
An impression of some deep similarities between the mood of Hardy’s
poems for his dead wife, and the great Oratorio, Symphonies and ’Cello
Concerto of Elgar, is perhaps worth recording.
The Great War occurred at a time of literary ferment, and some im-
portant new poets emerged. While Rupert Brooke celebrated the old
romantic concept of patriotism and glory, a poetry of war as the twentieth
century was to know it was being born. Wilfred Owen’s Futility stands as
a poetic equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a memorial to
an anonymous young man squandered:
Move him into the sun —
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
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Think how it wakes the seeds, —
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved — still warm — too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
— O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
‘My subject is War,’ wrote Owen, ‘and the pity of War. The Poetry is
in the pity.’ In Futility and a handful of other minor masterpieces he
explored new techniques of language and rhyme to embody his pity:
assonances and consonances instead of full rhyme, to challenge the ear;
stark images of death and violence from which no aesthetic consolations
could be drawn. Now in the middle of the 1960s, Owen’s poetry
has been given wide currency, through the revival of popular interest in
the first world war, and in particular through Benjamin Britten’s War
Requiem. University students are more likely to be familiar with
Owen’s poetry than with Auden’s or Graves’s. Clearly, Owen’s voice has
come to seem especially valid in the atomic age. He marks the moment,
in 1916 or 1917, when nearly everything that poets had written about
war from the beginnings of literature became irrelevant to the future of
man.
In Europe, the most striking war poet was Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880-1918), whose Calligrammes (1918) include some of his greatest work.
He died of Spanish ’flu in November 1918, within a week of Wilfred Owen.
The other most important British poet of the war period was Edward
Thomas, a writer of great sweetness and charm, who could sometimes
achieve, in deceptively simple and pastoral poems, wonderfully vivid
images of the world that was passing away. In Adlestrop, he captures the
very essence of what was once a familiar railway experience. And sud-
denly, in the uncovenanted delight of a heightened moment, we hear
them — the very last enchantments of the older England, still there, among
the industrial and military threats; but for how long?
Yes, I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
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And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
But already poetry was off on other tracks. Some years before the war,
there had been a minor revolt. The group of poets published in antho-
logies by Sir Edward Marsh between 1912 and 1922, and now usually
referred to as ‘Georgians’, had rejected the more stuffy and didactic
aspects of fin de siecle versifying, whilst retaining certain other affinities
with the late Victorian tradition. They continued to value lyricism, music,
‘poetic’ themes and imagery, and to believe that the poet’s chief task is to
console and uplift the human spirit by his creation of beauty. Sir Edward
Marsh gathered together many of the best poets of his time, including
Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, W. H. Davies and D. H. Lawrence,
and his taste was by no means as narrow as later adverse critics have
thought. He proved that a considerable market for poetry of this kind
existed among ordinary intelligent readers, since his anthologies sold as
poetry was not to do again until very recent times.
Yet the Georgian taste, catholic and popular within limits as it was,
proved an irritant to another group of young poets. In 1913 the Imagists
announced themselves in a Manifesto, and proclaimed entirely new prin-
ciples for verse. Among their tenets was the notion that poetry must reach
out to explore and encompass the whole of reality. In a world of great
cities, motor-cars, aeroplanes, the poet could no longer write about pastoral
feelings among pleasing scenes. The underlying notion of the imagists was
that the poet must seek truth even before beauty. If he makes beauty his
end, he may become simply escapist. Only if he engages with the fullest
experiences of modem man can he revitalise language and create poems
relevant to life. The Imagists believed that the Victorian conventions of
diction, rhyme and imagery were played out; a pioneering sensibility
requires experiments in form. So the demand of the 1913 Manifesto was
for freedom, of style and content ; and for the recognition, through such
freedom, that poetic experience centres in the actual images that poets
create. As T. S. Eliot was later to put it in his essay on Hamlet, the poet
seeks an ‘objective correlative’ for his experience: ‘in other words, a set
of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked’.
This notion of ‘the image’ is wide enough to include whole poems, and
even whole plays and whole novels. The stress is on verbal precision and
on the ‘ concrete ’ ; but on the kind of precision and concreteness which, by
capturing an experience completely, leaves the experience open and re-
sonant, as it would be in life. So the imagist poet is inclined to forsake such
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normal literary conventions of communication as grammar and syntax,
logical connections, traditional expectations of language and genre, and
to t hink of poetry as working, rather, through ‘imaginative order’. His
stress falls on originality and precision; the only test of a poem is the test
of whether it works. The life of images is in their own interplay, in juxta-
positions which set up reverberations in the reader’s conscious, or even
unconscious, mind. The Waste Land, said Michael Roberts, in the famous
Introduction to his Faber Book of Modern Verse,
possesses ‘imaginative order’, by which I mean, that to some minds it is cogent even
before its narrative and argumentative continuity is grasped. This ‘imaginative
order’ is not something arbitrary, specific and inexplicable. If the images which are
used to denote complex situations were replaced by abstractions much of the
apparent incoherence of the poem would vanish. It would become a prose descrip-
tion of the condition of the world, a restatement of a myth and a defence of the
tragic view of life. But being a poem it does more than this; a poem expresses not
merely the idea of a social or scientific fact, but also the sensation of thinking or
knowing, and it does not merely define the tragic view, it may communicate it.
One sees clearly enough in such a formulation the influence of Baudelaire,
Laforgue and Rimbaud; the affinities between Imagists and Symbolists
amount to a debt. The ‘image’ becomes valued, like the French ‘symbol’,
for its resonances; for its power to release overtones, suggestions, arche-
types, just under the surfaces of conscious feeling and thought.
Eliot has been mentioned of necessity, and his importance to this great
phase of modern poetry is sufficiently clear. It is of interest that he and
Pound were the only distinguished poets associated with the imagist
movement, and that both, like James before them, were American and
European in almost equal degrees. The importance of imagism as a
specific movement depends almost wholly on the work of these two —
especially on Pound’s Canzoni (19 1 1) and subsequent volumes, and Eliot’s
Prufrock (1917). But the underlying importance of imagism was as a
manifestation of ‘the modem’; its manifesto was no doubt helped by the
perception that Yeats’s major verse, though wholly independent, was
increasingly imagistic, and by the posthumous publication in 1918 of the
poetry of Hopkins. Hopkins became so entirely a modern by adoption,
that students are amazed to discover the dates (1844-89) of his birth and
death.
But, at the same time, the central relevance of imagism was confirmed
by the work of two important novelists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf,
whose experiments in the novel led them to define principles of ‘imagina-
tive order’ akin to those of Eliot and Pound. The distinction between
prose and poetry wore thin, and creative writers started to think of both
as the release, through verbal precision, of imaginative truth. As soon as
the novel is mentioned, however, one becomes aware of influences from
Europe in the very near background. Just as the British modem poets
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were blood relations of Mallarme, Valery and Rilke, so the modern novel-
ists discovered their closeness to Thomas Mann ( Buddenbrooks 1901,
Tristan 1903, Der Tod in Venedig 1913) and to Gide {V Immoraliste 1902,
La Porte Etroite 1909). Out of this whole ferment the word ‘modern’
emerges, and it is time now to take a closer look at that.
What is ‘modem’, in the sense that these writers appropriated it; what,
if anything, does it mean? The argument has raged so fiercely, and shape-
lessly, that one can be grateful for the perspective provided in two recent
books. The first is an anthology of documents taken from ‘modem’
writers de finin g themselves, The Modern Tradition , edited by Richard
Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jnr (New York, 1965). The second is
Stephen Spender’s The Struggle of the Modern (1963), which as its name
implies is not only a definition of the modem, but also a polemical defence.
The ‘modem’, in Spender’s view, is a way of life before it is a literary
programme. The situation of modem man is unprecedented, and his
experiences need unprecedented forms of expression. As a social being he
inhabits an industrial world which differs utterly from anything known
before the mid-eighteenth century, both in its mode of living, with all the
assumptions implied in that, and in its growing fear of world destruction.
Cut off from traditional resources, he is denied an identity. There are no
certainties for him of class or status, no moral, political or religious
opinions that are generally received and operative in the social life. Yet, as
the writer’s difficulties increase, so do his opportunities. Perhaps he alone
can offer insight, and even salvation, ironically diminished though his social
role appears to be. He may even become, in his own estimation, an Atlas-
figure, bearing the whole burden of the world’s consciousness, the
world’s suffering, alone. But, by the same token, his situation can be
profoundly depressing; how can a sensitive man take on such burdens
and retain his poise? Little wonder that the ‘modem’ often defines itself
pessimistically, in terms of riches and serenities lost in the past. Many of
the modems, including Eliot and Lawrence, looked back to historically
happier times. For Eliot, there was the period before Dryden and Milton,
when thinking and feeling were properly ‘associated’, and there was no
split, as there has been since, between the two. For Lawrence, there was
the primitivist vision of pre-industrial England, when men lived nearer to
nature, and were their natural, spontaneous selves.
In a sense, this myth of a forfeited heritage is a much older tradition ;
its earlier exponents include many illustrious eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century names. Naturally no two exponents agree on all the evil forces
operative, so that the fall from grace has been variously placed. And
naturally (the historian will perceive) there is much disreputable history;
the literary tradition requires more Golden Ages than the past can con-
veniently hold. The tradition, then, is too venerable to be claimed as
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distinctively ‘modem’, but the moderns have fairly widely adopted it,
along with frequent refinements of their own. Of particular interest is the
modem attitude to the early Romantics. Instead of receiving adulation as
enlightened precursors, these have often figured in a villainous role. In
the writings of Hulme and T. S. Eliot they become scapegoats, almost,
along with the liberal humanists, for our post-industrial fall. For what if
the main enemy to man’s serenity is within his citadel : if the ‘ holiness of
the heart’s affections’ turns into the seething turbulence discovered by
Freud? Divorced from any formal contexts or disciplines, might ‘nature’
not lead straight to the waste land itself? The romantic values of intense
emotional feeling, of optimistic humanism, of ‘ sincerity ’, were to receive
indeed a notable battering, not least from Eliot himself.
Such doubts can also be found (though D. H. Lawrence is an important
exception) in a great many modems. The satires of Aldous Huxley and
Evelyn Waugh point a similar moral ; the world of Kafka embodies the
nightmare of living with the insoluble enigma of oneself. But merely to
mention all these writers alerts us to a very basic danger: ‘modem’
writers are so highly distinctive and idiosyncratic, that generalisations
about them are bound, if pressed, to break down.
For convenience, we might alight on two major modern masterpieces,
both published in that literary annus mirabilis 1922. Joyce’s Ulysses is
often called a prose epic, and Eliot’s The Waste Land the verse epic, or
mock-epic, of its age. Joyce’s Ulysses is modem both in its vitality and
originality of language, and in its highly experimental form. A day in the
life of Bloom, a contemporary Dubliner, is explored in very great depth.
There is not plot of a normal kind, merely an accumulation of incidents,
many of which might seem trivial if they were explored with less imagina-
tive power. The realism of detail is so minutely faithful, that it becomes
unfamiliar; the Circe episode breaks new ground in depicting urban
squalor, but in doing so colours Dublin with the nightmare intensity of
myth. (In this, Dickens was perhaps a more important influence than
Zola.) At the same time, Joyce uses the technique which Proust and
Virginia Woolf were also, through their very different sensibilities,
exploring — the ‘stream of consciousness’, which follows the thoughts and
feelings of an individual so closely that we experience events through his
conscious, and to some extent his half-conscious or even sub-conscious,
mind. This technique is realistic in its remarkable pursuit of inner realities;
but, because the realities are inner, it can diverge from social ‘realism’
very sharply indeed. It can exist in ironic counterpoint, sometimes comic,
sometimes tragic, with the external situation; or it can underline the entire
isolation of the individual inside his own consciousness, where heightened
sensitivity may have to be paid for with delusion, breakdown, or death.
In Virginia Woolf, there is the further twist that her characters have the
kind of abnormal consciousness which is often associated with mysticism,
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but which seems for them, rather, to emphasise a paralysing isolation in
the self.
The greatest of all the stream-of-consciousness writers was Proust,
whose vast A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-28) explores so completely
the possibilities of marrying this technique with symbolism, that a
distinctive approach to literature has been rendered unworkable again.
But mention of Proust returns one to the particular virtues of Ulysses :
though Joyce never matches Proust in sheer depth of psychological in-
sight and evocation, Ulysses is arguably closer to the centre of normal
human life. The main fact about Bloom, and his wife Molly, is their
sanity; our insight into them has the effect of healing, as well as deepening,
our social sense. If there is a weakness in Ulysses, it is in its Homeric
superstructure; the notion of counterpointing a modem day against the
myth of Ulysses, whilst undoubtedly suggestive, produces effects not easy
to define. Some of the parallels are too contrived to be taken seriously, and,
whether mock-heroic deflation is or is not intended, the allusiveness is as
likely to distract as to help. But perhaps over-allusiveness is a flaw in much
modern literature. In creating deliberate obstacles for the reader, it is almost
wilfully non-communicative; even The Waste Land is marred, while
Pound’s Cantos, for all their marvellous moments, are wholly wrecked.
The Waste Land is the other masterpiece of the annus mirabilis, a free-
verse poem with occasional excursions into metre and rhyme. There is
much allusion to earlier literature, and as in Ulysses the effect is primarily
ironic, though whether the past is deflating the present or the present the
past is not always clear. Does Eliot’s modem neurotic beauty (‘ The Chair
she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble . . . ’) mark a
decline from Cleopatra, or might she be the reality behind Cleopatra
herself? Eliot forces the question upon us, but does not solve it; if the
answer is ‘both’, then the poem is odder than is usually thought. The
poem is essentially an account of modem London, but London related to
other great cities, now and earlier, and also to Dante’s Hell. The following
lines are a useful microcosm of Eliot’s numerous levels of meaning:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
This evocation of rush-hour London is very beautiful, even though the
suggestion is of lost directions in a spiritual fog. The crowd flows over the
bridge as the river flows under it; the quotation places the crowd with the
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drifting souls of Dante’s Inferno, neither good enough for salvation, nor
bad enough for the really sadistic torments of Hell. But what one is most
captured by is the extraordinary resonance. No doubt St Mary Woolnoth
does strike nine like this, as Eliot’s notes assure us, but the effect is nearer
to Charon (in Dante’s same Canto) waiting to bear the souls of the lost
into Hell.
The main framework of Eliot’s poem is in two death-and-resurrection
cycles, the ordinary round of months and seasons, and the persistent
pagan and Christian myths of a dying god. The temporal cycle in the
poem holds no hope of salvation; April is the cruellest month, waking
from winter forgetfulness into the suffering of life. Our modem world is a
scene of aridity, staleness, delirium, broken images; a world mirrored in
loneliness and sterility, in episodes of sordid and despairing sex:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare.
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. . .
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She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand.
And puts a record on the gramophone.
No hope for man is envisaged through the social or political framework.
The only hope is from a religious dimension; but the religious hope is
itself involved with the waste land imagery, and poised between delirium
and joy. The mysterious stranger in the Emmaus road episode may be
the risen Christ, over death victorious ; or he may be the final illusion of
delirious men dying of thirst. Later Eliot became a Christian, and with
hindsight one can read the poem as a movement towards faith. But faith
is present in the poem only through enigma; the positive experience is of
sickness in society, and boredom with life.
And this poses a very interesting problem; why was the poem received,
by Michael Roberts and others, as a report on our modem society as it is?
The more obvious interpretation is as an image of the poet’s personal
neuroses ; the world can indeed appear like this, one realises, but seldom to
anyone in normal health. Part of Eliot’s success is in his vivid evocations;
undeniably there are moments of depression for most of us as Eliot depicts
them, and the accumulation of such moments in major poetry can make
them seem more typical than they are. There are very broken-down and
bitchy old women in public houses, but is the public-house dialogue in
part n of the poem typical even of a cockney public bar? To anyone who
enjoys London public houses there is no self-evident connection between
the ‘hurry up please’, the noise and chatter of closing time, and the
collapse of civilised values beyond recall. Perhaps it is a danger in the
imagist method that so few readers notice the oddity of Eliot’s associa-
tions ; if spelled out in more conventional language, this would immediately
be seen. And of course the whole poem might alert us to certain other
forces behind Eliot’s depression : the suggestion that a ‘ small house agent’s
clerk’ can be nothing but ‘carbuncular’ ; the equation of political changes
in eastern Europe with the descent of the barbarian hordes.
These comments are not to throw doubts on the poem’s greatness, but
to question the kind of reputation it has acquired. The Waste Land seems
a morbid and unusual poem rather than a mirror of English society; it is
not a mirror, surely, but a distorting mirror, with the distortion somewhere
in the poet himself. What must interest us is the number of intellectuals
who clearly accepted it at its face value; why did Eliot’s extreme pessi-
mism awaken an echo in so many hearts? Fear of the future, and of inter-
national chaos, must be one answer; fear of human nature, as the Great
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War had shown it to be, another. Perhaps the new psychology added to
a prevailing sense of breakdown and confusion ; perhaps it was less easy
for sensitive men to adjust to accelerating changes in the 1920s than it
has since (apparently) become. But also, there was a general desire among
creative writers to find salvation, and The Waste Land mirrors a widely
felt spiritual malaise. Some writers, like Eliot himself and later Auden,
moved to Anglo-Catholicism; some, like Graham Greene and Evelyn
Waugh, to Roman Catholicism; some, like Aldous Huxley, Yeats and
Lawrence, to a variety of mysticisms ; some, like the poets of the ’thirties,
to Marxism, or to other robust political faiths.
The 1 920s is a period so rich in western literature, that a survey of this
kind can attempt little more than a listing of names. In America the theme
of the waste land was undertaken by Scott Fitzgerald (the phrase is
actually used in The Great Gatsby, 1925), but Fitzgerald infused into it his
own splendidly human warmth. The Great Gatsby is a novel of the highest
worth and perfection; if it is surpassed at all on its own ground, then this is
only by Fitzgerald’s most ambitious novel Tender is the Night (1934),
which was received tepidly by its original critics, but already stands out as
a major work of our time. In Tender is the Night, a young doctor, Dick
Diver, is shown at the moment when he starts to go downhill. He marries a
highly neurotic wife, Nicole, in ambiguous circumstances; Nicole’s rich
relations want, in effect, to buy her a permanent doctor, but Dick, who
knows this, marries chiefly for love. In the course of the novel, he succeeds
in curing Nicole, but more in his role of husband than as doctor. At the
end, his wife is whole again, but he is broken. The tragedy is that Nicole,
despite everything, has the hardness needed for survival; when the cure is
completed, she is free to be independent again. The doctor’s reward is to
become redundant; but, when the doctor is also husband, and his energies
have been exhausted, emotional collapse seems the inevitable end. Yet
Dick’s acceptance of Nicole was taken in full knowledge of its probable
outcome, so that his downfall suggests the kind of moral already encoun-
tered in Hardy and James. Perhaps superior sensitivity in the modem
world is no more than a crippling handicap : yet a handicap which few of
us would be without.
In Europe, Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt (1926) established new standards
of autobiographical honesty, and Andre Breton’s Nadja was a portent of
surrealism in 1928. But the most remarkable writer of the ’twenties was
Kafka, whose two great works ( The Trial, published posthumously 1925,
The Castle, published 1926) are central nightmares of our time. In each, a
semi-anonymous character is caught up in a situation of increasing
complexity, where his efforts to understand lead to deepening bewilder-
ment, and his efforts to survive are frustrated by events. There seems to be
some prophetic sense of the impending fascist terror; the literal enemies
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are politicians and bureaucrats behind the scenes. But the novels are
political prophecy only incidentally; as allegory, they explore modern
man’s quest for religious truth. The obvious suggestion is of gods non-
existent, or hostile, or at the very least inaccessible (though it could be
claimed that a kind of dark Barthian Protestantism, which rejects human
reason and morality and defines God as ‘Wholly Other’, underlies the
events). And, of course, Kafka’s novels can be seen as the product of a
morbid sensibility; at least one eminent doctor has found them a case-
book example of paranoid delusions, and little more. But, if so, a highly
significant question again confronts us: why should modem man so
readily find in paranoid delusions his image of truth? With Kafka one
cannot suspect a shrinking from sexuality as one does in Eliot, or any
simple distaste for the lower class. His vision is the deeper nightmare
which Orwell’s 1984 later embodied, when it had been hideously authentic-
ated by the history of later times. What are we to say of an age when men
who morbidly think themselves persecuted really are persecuted; when
events that ought to be clinical fantasies turn into political truths?
The English writer of the 1910s and 1920s who has received most
attention is D. H. Lawrence, and at first sight he may appear to offer a
powerful counterblast to so much gloom. From his successful Sons and
Lovers (1913) he progressed through numerous short stories and novels,
including the two novels generally accepted by Lawrentians as his master-
pieces, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), to his last, and
most posthumously controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).
Undoubtedly these works were written with extraordinary vigour, and
with fine imaginative insight into people and places. Yet their underlying
raison d'etre seems often prophetic ; Lawrence was a messianic writer, who
became increasingly bitter as he judged himself rejected by the world.
At the heart of his vision is a passionate romanticism. He believed in
man’s vast potentiality for vitality and happiness, and resented social
attitudes that put the human spirit in chains. In his essay Democracy he
discerns three modern enemies to individual fulfilment: worship of the
average, the uniformity of dullness ; worship of The One, the uniformity
of self-immolation; and the cult of ‘personality’, the uniformity of a
conformist social facade. Against these enemies he proclaims ‘ individual-
ism’, which is the individual’s cultivation of inner riches, the organic
flowering of his unique, spontaneous self. But it is important to remember
that Lawrence did not believe in solitary flowering. Men need human
relationships, especially family relationships, to fulfil themselves, and it is
in studying these, with exceptional insight and delicacy, that Lawrence is
often at his best. One of his basic convictions was that body and mind are
not divided; ‘Man is one,’ he wrote, ‘body and soul; and his parts are
not at war with one another.’ In place of the older notion that the mind
is our ‘higher’ part, and our body the ‘lower’, Lawrence poses a fruitful
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equality of the two. Sexual love is humanly good, and humanly necessary,
but there must be a total meeting of mind, spirit and body in the physical
act. Like Blake, whom he clearly resembles, Lawrence believed that the
giants of human passion control one another if freed from restriction; a
man’s tenderness and loyalty protect him from promiscuity far more
effectively than a negative religious commandment, or a legal rule.
Lawrence’s power in depicting his vision cannot be questioned, but his
novels are not as unclouded as this would suggest. He could also be
destructive and sadistic; these impulses are present from the beginning of
his work to the end. His views on sex were apt to be strangely qualified.
Sometimes he presents it as an initiation beyond human relationship into
mystical experience; sometimes he concentrates, as in Lady Chat ter ley' s
Lover, on the physical act — Lady Chatterley’s desertion of her husband,
and the undercurrent of revenge and violence in Mellors’s life with her,
depart strikingly from his normal views. One detects in the later Lawrence
a growing frustration. Confronted with tragic elements in the human
predicament, including the loss of youth and vitality, he looks for human
scapegoats. His tirades take on a note of hysteria, and his positive vision
ceases to ring true. Towards the end of his life, he became fascinated with
death and resurrection. His later poems are a preparation for some new
life on the other side of the ultimate darkness, and his phoenix symbol
assumes religious overtones of a mystical kind. Had he lived, he might have
developed as a religious writer, and followed the mystical path of his ad-
mirer, and apparent polar opposite, Aldous Huxley. He will remain one
of the most fascinating of modem writers, especially when he has been
rescued from his friends.
The inter-war years, though serious, had their lighter moments; it was
a great time for cranks and eccentrics, pioneers and prophets, exotic
scandal and revolt. The popular press was creating the taste by which it
was enjoyed (like Eliot); its sensations chart zestful as well as painful
headline news. This is the ethos in which the two major ironists flourished
— Aldous Huxley ( Crome Yellow 1921, Antic Hay 1923, Point Counter
Point 1928, Brave New World 1932, Eyeless in Gaza 1936, After Many a
Summer 1939), and Evelyn Waugh C Decline and Fall 1928, Vile Bodies 1930,
Black Mischief 1932, Handful of Dust 1934, Scoop 1938). Both writers
engage with the world of upper-class exoticism, the Mayfair smart set, the
bright young things, the press barons and the messianic pretenders, the
fashionable corrupters and the ageing corrupt. Both find in the gaiety of
this world an edge of desperation, a waste land sport over various kinds of
abyss. In Huxley, the satire is always cutting, with a hard, sharp edge of
fear. His heroes seem to parody Lawrence’s hopes of sexual salvation,
and it is not surprising that he moved off, through renunciation of the
flesh, towards a mystical faith. Evelyn Waugh, though fully as amusing as
Huxley, and sometimes almost more outrageous, is always a little in love
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with the world that his satire rejects. ‘Youth is brief, and Love has wings;
Time will tarnish, ’ere we know, The brightness of the bright young
things. . Yet Waugh’s ruthlessness reflects a final coldness towards, or
contemptuous dismissal of, his people; he seldom seems as serious as
Huxley, behind his facade.
In Huxley and Waugh the world of broken images turns into farce and
absurdity; in other writers, as the 1930s wore on and the storm clouds
darkened, it became a challenge to sterner things. In 1930 Auden published
his first volume, and during the 1930s he and a group of young poets akin
to him became famous. Some of the relevant names and volumes are:
W. H. Auden, Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), Dance of Death (1933),
Look Stranger (1936); Louis MacNeice, Blind Fireworks (1929), Poems
(1935), Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939); Stephen Spender,
Poems ( 1 933), Vienna (1934), Still Centre (1929) ; C. Day Lewis, Beechen Vigil
(1925), Country Comets (1928), Transitional Poem (1929), From Feathers
to Iron (193 1), Magnetic Mountain (1933), Time to Dance (1935), Overtures
to Death (1938). These ‘poets of the ’30s’, as they have since been called,
were all very youthful poets, ‘ poets exploding like bombs ’, as Auden has it
in Spain 1937. Their verse matches great freshness and energy with strong
social commitment; for the first time since the very early nineteenth
century, a group of poets was actively campaigning for a political cause.
Their position involves a basic critique of capitalist society. Spender
writes about the unemployed as the drifting flotsam of society in a poem
which explicitly refuses to embroider their predicament with art. The
poetry, as for Owen, is in the pity; and the pity, now, is a revolutionary
challenge to the world. As the 1930s unfolded, ‘the enemy’ was totally
identified with fascism. The Spanish Civil War engaged these poets
passionately, as it engaged, of course, many other writers, including those
like Orwell who were less enthusiastically Left wing. Auden’s Spain 1937
is the best of several poems written on this war — a call to fight for the
survival of civilisation while there is still time to fight; a reminder that
man alone shapes the destiny of the modem world:
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
These poets of the ’thirties were exciting and influential rather than out-
standing — yet their standards were exacting, and Auden, at least, is one
of the metrical masters of modem verse. In this, he was equalled in the
1 930s only by Dylan Thomas, whose early poems arrived on the literary
scene like a portent with Eighteen Poems (1934), though his best work
was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s, just before his death. The
poetic freshness of Auden and MacNeice is often metrical and verbal —
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exuberant intelligence, and pleasure in intelligence as a good in itself. But
Dylan Thomas’s power over language is more deeply original. He can
make the most familiar ideas and phrases sound new minted ; his control
over complex syntactical structures and complex stanza forms became
more and more remarkable with the years.
There were at least two other striking poetic voices on the English scene,
Robert Graves and Edwin Muir — both fine, if more traditional, poets
who achieved their greatest fame at a later time. And, in America, the
modem movement was continued through a host of important poets —
Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Richard Eberhart, to name only
a few.
Even so, one may feel in the late 1920s and the early 1930s that the
novel was holding its own with poetry : though there may be no new novel-
ists of the eminence of James, Conrad, Mann, Kafka and Scott Fitz-
gerald, there are a number very high in the second rank. In England,
Graham Greene and George Orwell ; in America Faulkner and Heming-
way, with perhaps Steinbeck as a third. Of these, Graham Greene received
wider recognition in Europe than most of his English contemporaries. In
the 1 930s, he offered a series of grim ‘entertainments’ which proved a
prelude to many greater achievements, and notably, in 1938, Brighton Rock.
The novelist’s triumph in Brighton Rock, as in several later novels, is to
present his own faith only in its most paradoxical form. The destiny of
Pinkie, the delinquent young hero, is presented with almost Jansenist
determinism, and the priest’s attempts to console Pinkie’s wife at the end
of the novel seem designed to show the powerlessness, even the irrelevance,
of faith. None the less, Greene convinces us that there are orders of reality
outside the vision of Ida Arnold, the courageous, happily pagan barmaid
who tracks Pinkie down. Without qualifying her attractiveness, which is
continually manifest, he presents his tormented Catholics as inhabiting a
more real, if more terrible, world. Against her secular code of ‘right and
wrong’ is posed the religious view of Good and Evil. Pinkie is evil, but he
is also Catholic; his drama is the mystery of iniquity.
As a novelist, Graham Greene has the rare gift of combining plots
attuned to the conventions of the thriller with explorations of complex
moral and religious concern. The quality of compassion in the novels is
deepened by the sense of evil, but we are never allowed to forget that com-
passion itself may be infected ; Greene can make his highest values at home
in hell.
In temperament and values Orwell seems poles apart from Greene, but
he produced visions of evil, especially just before his death in the late
1 940s, which make certain joint literary influences unusually plain. Both
writers were profoundly influenced by Dostoevsky and Kafka, in their
creation of criminal outcasts suffering the traditional torments of the
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damned. Like many other central twentieth-century figures, Orwell can
seem oddly contradictory — a rebel by instinct, yet an admirer of Kipling;
a martyr in his life for working-class values, yet the writer who produced
the Animal Farm sheep and the 1984 proles. Sir Richard Rees has dis-
cerned in Orwell four apparently conflicting strands, the rebel, the
paternalist, the rationalist and the romantic. And he has reminded us that
Orwell was a man in whom a passionate love of justice and a passionate
bitterness were apt to meet. 1 The hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying seems
prophetic of the ‘angry young man’ of the 1950s — a man whose social
anger, though bom in idealism and outrage, turns by degrees to bitterness
and negation, an ‘evil mutinous mood’ to use Orwell’s term. Throughout
the early Orwell, however, there is clear common sense as well as im-
passioned honesty; and, underlying everything, the clear-eyed acceptance
of Everyman’s plight in a tragic world. Perhaps no literary documents
evoke the mood of the 1930s more memorably — Down and Out in Paris
and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman' s Daughter (1935),
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937),
Homage to Catalonia (1938), Coming Up For Air (1939).
Such brief comments would not be complete without the mention of
certain European chronicles of the new dark age — Antoine de Saint
Exupery’s Voldenuit (1931), Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Voyage au bout de
la nuit (1932), Andre Malraux’s La Condition humaine (1933) — and, of
course, of Christopher Isherwood’s two tours de force, Mr Norris Changes
Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). J.-P. Sartre’s La Nausee
appeared in 1938, and 1939 saw the completion, after fourteen years, of
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Drama has been absent from this discussion, since, though it is always
relevant to the ‘modern’, it has developed to laws of its own. More
insistently even than for poetry and the novel, a consideration of drama
needs a European frame. In the background are the formidable figures of
Ibsen and Strindberg, the former one of the great tragic dramatists from
any period, the latter fascinating and influential, if somewhat less great.
Ibsen’s early plays up to and including A Doll's House were mainly
preoccupied with social problems. His people found themselves trapped
in a repressive society, which utterly opposed any joy or freedom in life.
The women, in particular, were reduced to toys and dolls. A Doll's
House (1879) shows a woman breaking out of these moulds in search of
fulfilment. She needs courage, clearly, to affront society and to risk her
security; courage especially to risk hurting those close to her, with the
further resulting harm to herself. She needs the kind of courage, moreover,
which can involve itself in insoluble moral ambiguities ; if anyone says that
Nora is simply a lying and heartless mother, who can ever completely
1 Sir Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961).
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deny this, including herself? But, given courage, victory is not impossible.
At the end of A Doll’s House Nora’s decision, though costly, is basically
justified; she has proved that a sensitive and adult woman can bring her-
self to behave with the degree of freedom which would come with fewer
difficulties to the depraved. We are left feeling that her courage might
help eventually to change society, so that such freedom might become less
exceptional, less ambiguous and tainted, with time.
With Ghosts (1881), however, Ibsen’s sense of ambiguities deepens, and
his great phase as a tragic dramatist really begins. His later plays develop
Sophoclean patterns of irony; the deadly power of the Past allies itself
with an unpropitious society, to destroy those seeking dangerous freedoms
of aspiration and joy. The equivocal nature of idealism becomes ever
more apparent; perhaps the idealists and liberators are more dangerous
in the last analysis, more tainted and unrealistic, than such open enemies
of joy as Pastor Manders and Kroll. Ibsen’s later plays explore the com-
plex contradictions and delusions of those whose aspiration or idealism
lifts them above the crowd; his leading characters become destructive
through the very conditions inherent in their choice. It is possible to feel
that characters like Solness and Hilda in The Master Builder (1892) are too
purely immersed in delusion to be fully tragic. But John Gabriel Borkman
(1896) can be read as a universal tragedy of overreaching modem man.
Strindberg carried the tradition of the neurotic, or mad, hero much
further than Ibsen. His main theme is of basic and inescapable human
conflict, between man and woman, master and servant, the weak and the
strong. In Miss Julie (1888), the twin battles of sex and class are played
out against a background of impending revolution and social violence.
The later plays become more symbolic, and at the same time more
characterised by Strindberg’s peculiar coldness; in the preface to Miss
Julie he actually discusses tragic pity as a somewhat ignoble extension of
personal fear. But his situations, of people destined to torment and
destroy one another, some through neurotic weakness, some through
sanity manifesting itself in forms almost wholly cruel, were fruitful to the
whole modern tradition. The themes are taken up by two much more
warmly human tragic dramatists, Eugene O’Neill inside our period, and
Tennessee Williams just outside. They anticipated some of the chillier
discoveries of the coming science (or art) of psychiatry; they provided
dramatic formulae which influenced writers as diverse as Sartre and
Pinter.
Meanwhile, the years 1895-1905 saw the major achievements of Chek-
hov, another dramatist whom one would name, with Ibsen, among the
truly great. Chekhov’s people are typical sensitive and frustrated products
of a decaying society, tormented with their helplessness, and reduced to
vague hopes for some future when people will be less doomed to futility
than themselves: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three
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Sisters (1901), The Cherry Orchard (1904). These plays are not called
‘tragedies’ by Chekhov, and they culminate in no tragic catharsis; there
is too much futility for catharsis, the suffering is too near to the absurd.
Yet the suffering is never wholly naked nor wholly ridiculous; a richly
elegiac note pervades and transforms the plays. Even in Uncle Vanya,
where the hero’s attempt to rise to tragic action collapses in farce, our
final impression is not of absurdity, but of poignant lyricism — in Helena’s
boredom, Astroff’s fury, Vanya’s self-knowledge, Sonia’s movingly ambi-
valent final speech. Chekhov’s importance to the historian of drama is
chiefly as an influence, an explorer of the borderland between tragedy and
farce. But his real importance is far more than as simply an influence : he
is the greatest, as well as the first, dramatist of the absurd.
In English drama the period is dominated by Shaw, a superbly comic
dramatist, but scarcely of the same stature as Ibsen and Chekhov. Shaw
defended Ibsen vigorously against his detractors in The Quintessence of
Jbsenism (1891), but, while he did justice to many of Ibsen’s subtleties, his
main concern was with the dramatist of social reform. Ibsen interested
Shaw as a dramatist who used the theatre as a moral challenge to society,
posing problems that might still, with courage and honesty, be solved.
Shaw himself was a great believer in reason; he pioneered ceaselessly for
good sense on a very wide variety of social topics, as a selection from his
many titles amply shows: Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), Three
Plays for Puritans (1900), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905),
The Doctor's Dilemma (1911), Pygmalion (1912), Androcles and the Lion
(1916), Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1921), St Joan
(1924), The Apple Cart (1930), The Millionairess (1936). An underestimate
of Shaw today often rests on a simple lack of historical insight; much of
what he fought for is now either taken for granted, or written off as
simply cranky and not worth the time. And another cause for under-
estimating Shaw may be the modem underestimate of intellect; critics are
unwilling to admit that intelligence can be a sparkling and legitimate
pleasure in itself. Yet there is the possibility, too, that Shaw’s drama was
unduly polemical; there is some minim al truth in the jibe that the Prefaces
are more important than the Plays. Shaw relied too exclusively on reason
to support the dramatic experience ; we miss the symbolic and imaginative
resonances that seem always to be part of the greatest art. Like Wilde and
Butler, both of whom he admired, he delighted in shocking his audiences
— for the sake of the shock itself, because he was impish, but still more for
the salutary moral purpose behind the shock. But his plays are rigidly
ruled by reason, even in their shock tactics; the speeches are over-
rhetorical, and the characters seem imprisoned in their ideas. Shaw’s
solutions to social problems often rest on patent oversimplifications and
omissions. He falsifies — or overlooks — the complexities of human emo-
tions: he ascribes evil too simply to abstract ideals, or economic trends.
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With the lapse of time, Shaw’s plays remain amusing and highly readable
or viewable, but they refuse to look as significant as they should. The
significance was more for their own time than for all time. By the highest
tests, they remain in the second rank.
In the early twentieth century the theatre was dominated, even apart
from Shaw, by Irish dramatists. During the Edwardian years there were
the highly poetic plays of Yeats, and the equally poetic, though technically
prose, plays of Synge. Synge’s main dramas fall within a very short period :
In the Shadow of the Glen (1905), Riders to the Sea (1905), Well of the Saints
(1905), Playboy of the Western World (1907), Deirdre of the Sorrows
(1910). They are characterised by a highly stylised rhetoric, consciously
Irish, and attuned to the general tragic music of life. Whether Synge
picks great mythical figures like Deirdre, or the peasants and tinkers of his
own time, he brings out both the joy of life and the sadness of transience
and death. One is teased (as in Pinter) by a sense that his speech rhythms
are highly authentic, yet nearer to ritual than to daily life. The vitality and
humanity of his characters co-exist with something very like their op-
posite; ‘In Deirdre, for example, the characteristic falling cadences give a
curiously retrospective quality to the emotion as if the lovers from the
beginning were contemplating their own story, already past.’ 1 More than
usually (even) in tragedy, one is conscious of the beauty of the telling in
the sadness of the tale. There is the distinctive recurring music of the
cadences: ‘It’s getting old she is, and broken’ — and, more liturgically,
‘ May the Almighty God have mercy of Sheamus and Patch, and Stephen
and Shawn; and may he have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of
everyone is left living in the world.’ During the plays, Synge’s delight in
the wildness of nature and the lives of simple people mingles with the
inevitability of transience. At the end, one is reminded of the tragic
tradition of a few survivers left over a body or a grave, all passion spent.
Equally Irish, but otherwise almost wholly contrasted, was Sean
O’Casey, whose most famous dramas arise directly out of the Irish
‘troubles’: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1925)
and The Plough and the Stars (1926). O’Casey’s plays have more realism
than Synge’s; their dialogue, whilst being equally distinctive, is less
ritualistic, nearer to the rhythms of everyday speech. Technically un-
educated, he learned his creative art from other dramatists, especially
Shakespeare. His weakness, undoubtedly, was for the over-colourful and
the melodramatic. In The Plough and the Stars Nora's development from
normal sanity through extreme tension to madness is not wholly success-
ful; one feels so little potential for greatness in the other characters that
Nora does not symbolise the tragedy of Ireland as she should. But in Juno
and the Paycock the main characters are drawn with greater subtlety, and
Juno herself is built on a fully tragic scale.
1 Ronald Gaskell, ‘The Realism of J. M. Synge’, Critical Quarterly, vol. v (1963), p. 247.
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O’Casey’s main inspiration was his turbulent relationship with Ireland ;
when the unpopularity attendant upon this drove him into self-imposed
exile, he never recaptured his original fire. A class-conscious, obsessively
anti-Catholic Irish patriot, he was better placed than most men to enjoy
unpopularity; nor was he helped by his peculiarly mixed attitude to the
troubles themselves. For others, there was a transforming magic in the
days of martyrdom; Yeats, in his great poem Easter 1916, celebrates men
removed from the ‘casual comedy’ of ordinary living into the grander,
more permanent world of the heroic dead:
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is bom.
But for O’Casey, casual comedy co-exists with heroism; and beyond
casual comedy, bitter satire, as the former Irish militant shows corruption,
fear and absurdity behind the heroes themselves. No doubt the mid-
’twenties was a tactless time for such exposures, when independent
Ireland was at last emerging ; O’Casey’s kind of honesty is seldom popular
at the best of times. Yet his plays still retain their tremendous freshness
and vitality — the lives of the poor in the Dublin tenements, the human
fecklessness and courage, humour and resilience, in a testing time.
Though they are plays of hotblooded anger, they are the work of a crafts-
man. They seem nearer to direct imaginative experience than most of
Shaw.
At the same period the American Eugene O’Neill was making an
impact; never a great impact, since he has remained, even until the
present, the most underrated dramatist of our time. The earlier plays
were admittedly oversimplified, with crude situations, and characters
defined too simply through tricks of speech. But, as he developed through
his middle period, his tragic vision deepened; the use of myths released
his sense of family tragedy, and his explorations of human failure become
more and more moving. From early plays like The Emperor Jones (1921)
and Anna Christie (1922) he moved on through Desire Under the Elms
(1924) and The Great God Brown (1926) to Strange Interlude (1928) and
Mourning Becomes Electro (1931). His two greatest plays belong to a later
period — The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day's Journey Into Night,
discovered after his death. When the history of that period comes to be
written, these will certainly take their place with works by Sartre, Camus,
Brecht, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Genet, among major
drama in a period once parochially thought of, in England, as waiting for
Beckett.
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A final word about the revival of poetic drama in the 1930s. Though
there were one or two interesting left-wing plays (Auden and Isherwood,
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F. 6 (1936); Stephen
Spender, Trial of a Judge (1938)), the only major plays to emerge were
T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion
(i939)- Murder in the Cathedral was written to be performed in Canter-
bury Cathedral, and represents an early attempt to rescue drama from the
commercial theatre and restore it to a more serious stage. Eliot returned
to the Greek dramatists for his model, partly in order to enhance his
religious theme, and partly, he said later, to escape the pervasive influence
of Shakespeare upon English dramatic verse. The Chorus has a double
function, as in several Greek plays. It represents the attitudes of normal,
humble Christians to their Archbishop’s crisis, and at the same time evokes
a mounting atmosphere of fear and impending doom. The temptations of
Becket are a reminder that Eliot also learned his craft from English
Morality drama. They culminate in the unexpected fourth temptation,
when the Archbishop’s inner pride becomes incarnate, and he is invited
to ‘do the right deed for the wrong reason’. As the play progresses, the
audience is continually drawn in : first through the Chorus, which moves
freely about among it; then as congregation for Becket’s Christmas
sermon; and then as the actual object of temptation, when the Arch-
bishop’s murderers step out of the frame of the play. By this time, it is
easy to see how Eliot relates his historical episode to the mood of the
1930s, though less easy, perhaps, to accept his own premises as they
become apparent. None the less, the play does not simply descend to
being a direct moral challenge. The poetic texture is marvellously rich,
and its impact, in a church or cathedral, makes it the best specifically
Christian play in the English tongue.
In The Family Reunion Eliot takes on an even more ambitious theme, of
family doom and guilt in a claustrophobic setting. His method here
challenges direct comparison with Ibsen; a comparison which serves to
show, however, how decisively limited Eliot’s dramatic gifts were. The
ritualistic quality has the effect of slowing the action and depersonalising
the characters; one has the odd sense of witnessing an elaborate puzzle,
where the subtle ironies of moral behaviour and the traumatic events
alike seem deprived of their proper power.
In 1939 Christopher Fry wrote Boy with a Cart, but neither his later
plays, nor Eliot’s, could infuse real life into poetic drama. Murder in the
Cathedral remained an isolated success. Another twenty years was to pass
before the authentic rebirth in England of drama with the imaginative
intensity of poetry. Then it was to come through Beckett and Pinter, a
development that neither Eliot nor Fry could have foreseen.
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Perhaps we may conclude with a poem by the greatest British poet of
the time. Yeats has so far been mentioned only on the periphery, but,
though he evades most of the generalisation about ‘modern’ literature,
he remains among the greatest modems of them all. In 1937 he
published Lapis Lazuli.
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay.
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play.
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there.
The great stage curtain about to drop.
If worthy their prominent part in the play.
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages.
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard.
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back.
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to the rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the comer, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again.
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving man,
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Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche.
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky.
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes.
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
This wonderful poem turns on a word, and explores the resilience of man
and of art. Of what use is art, in a world of crisis? The word ‘gay’ is first
an abuse, a badge of the irresponsible; but the abuse, says Yeats, is
hysterical, even if we are, as the women fear, to be destroyed. In the
artist’s gaiety there is a hope beyond tragedy, a miracle somewhere in the
hinterland between life and art:
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. . .
But this gaiety is not escapism; it is a supreme conquest, in the fight of
which even the death of a civilisation may be faced:
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
The miracle of these fines is their effrontery. The insupportable burden
of the first! — the granite-like assurance of the second. But what is this
transfiguring gaiety which the poem asserts? If not of Hamlet the character
nor of Hamlet the actor, of Hamlet the idea perhaps — Hamlet removed
into the Byzantine permanence of art? In a sense, no doubt this is what
Yeats is saying: all art is ‘gay’ in its formal exuberance, for the artist
creating, for the actor or audience re-creating, however grim the tragedy
and desolating its relevance to fife. But the gaiety, the resilience, ‘belong’
neither to the artist nor to the art; their saving existence is some-
where between the two. And so the poem’s main image is of the lapis
lazuli, depicting its gay old men. The gaiety is theirs, as we see them
before us; yet the gaiety comes from human originals long since perished,
for where but in human eyes can the fight be seen? And then again, art
can perish, like the men who create it ; it is itself a thing that may fall and
be built again. In the poem’s splendid central section, Yeats achieves a
highly distinctive triumph; he not only asserts his theme but enacts it, as
the lost work of Callimachus returns to life in his fines. How Yeats evokes
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the grace and delicacy of the vanished artist! — calls back to it, across the
dark backward and abysm of time. And how relevant, later, that the very
cracks in the lapis lazuli should have become part of its intrinsic beauty;
that art should have assimilated the normal erosions of time. The inter-
action between art and life reminds us of Keats — the Grecian Urn especially
— but Yeats is saying finally different things. The Grecian Urn records an
unhealed, a tormenting dichotomy, of intensity and permanence fated
never to meet. One work of art (the Urn) gives birth to another work of
art (Keats’s poem), but the original lovers recede from us, and the
artists themselves recede in the time-scale of their art. In Yeats’s Lapis
Lazuli, a work of art dies, but is recalled by another artist — the art
depends on the artists as much as the artists upon the art. Just as the
gaiety may have permanence neither in a living old man nor in a lapis
lazuli figure, yet the two together attest the strength of gaiety in a tragic
world, so the human spirit, Yeats demonstrates, has its resilience in
creation; in creating and re-creating, there is the triumph of life. And this
moves us back to the poem’s last, and most unforgettable, image, of the
transforming gaiety somewhere between the onlooker and the art. The
poet, contemplating the art, becomes engaged with it; ‘I delight to
imagine’, he says. His delight is touched off by the art, then in turn,
re-creates it. The old men desire music, and music is played for them.
Somewhere between the poem and its audience the miracle happens,
‘Accomplished fingers begin to play.’ And meanwhile Yeats’s own
accomplished fingers reach for a pencil. On the brink of 1939 and of
European destruction, the artist testifies:
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes.
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
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CHAPTER XXI
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
I. PHILOSOPHY
P hilosophy is a continuing conversation. Its texture and structure,
its methods and results, are closely similar to those of an evening’s
talk in a crowded room. Somebody who comes along afterwards to
give you an account of what was said, whether he speaks as a direct ear-
witness and participant or as a more or less ill-informed reporter, will
present a picture that is distorted in one or more of a number of charac-
teristic ways. It will oversimplify or overcomplicate, dramatise too much
or too little; a monologue about a dialogue can never do full justice to its
changes of key, pitch and tempo. Unless the history of philosophy is
itself written as a conversation, it will not be likely to represent accurately
the conversation that is philosophy.
Although philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Hegel and Witt-
genstein have spoken of philosophy as dialectical, most philosophers, and
nearly all non-philosophical readers and observers of philosophy, have
failed to take seriously enough its dialectical, conversational character.
Both in the conduct of philosophy itself, and in writing the history of
philosophy, they have been too attached to political or even military
analogies: to pictures of philosophers as forming parties or regiments,
following leaders, firing at each other across gulfs, canyons or unbridgeable
torrents, or shouting at each other across the floor of a House firmly held
by stable coalitions, with only rare and abrupt changes of power.
These images are especially attractive, and at least as dangerous as usual,
in attempts to present a picture of what has happened in philosophy in
the twentieth century. There is much talk of a ‘revolution in philosophy’.
It is obscurely supposed that until about 1900 there was a Conservative
government of Absolute Idealists, who were then routed by a vigorous
alliance of Empiricists, Realists and Pragmatists, and that they in turn
formed a popular front with extremist Logical Positivists, who soon took
over the party and the country and held them until the sweets of office
softened them into the more moderate Linguistic Philosophers who now
have such an irresistible majority that they can afford to be deaf to the
growing whispers of counter-revolution.
The inaccuracy of this comfortably neat account becomes plain as
soon as we look at the detail of the philosophical situation at the turn of
the century, and in particular at what is widely quoted as the first shot in the
revolutionary war: G. E. Moore’s ‘The Refutation of Idealism’. 1 But to
1 Mind, 1903, reprinted in Philosophical Studies (1922).
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look at this classic document, or at F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality,
one of the leading texts of the Idealism against which it is directed, is also
to understand what makes the false picture plausible:
The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is
mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions,
wherever this may seem convenient. In this, as in other matters, Hegel’s main service
to philosophy has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type
of fallacy to which experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of man-
kind, to be addicted. No wonder that he has followers and admirers.
But three pages later, just when we may be thinking that here is a
clarion-call to a quite specific revolt, Moore writes :
And at this point I need not conceal my opinion that no philosopher has ever yet
succeeded in avoiding this self-contradictory error: that the most striking results
both of Idealism and of Agnosticism are only obtained by identifying blue with the
sensation of blue: that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is
held to be identical with the experience of it. That Berkeley and Mill committed this
error will, perhaps, be granted : that modem Idealists make it will, I hope, appear
more probable later.
‘ The Refutation of Idealism ’ is a contribution to a conversation in which
Hegel and Bradley, but also Berkeley and Mill, had been engaged. Moore
is challenging all of them and all other philosophers, on a point of common
concern to all of them. He is in conflict with his predecessors but therefore
also in contact with them. His demonstration that esse is not to be
identified with percipi, though it was indeed one of the forerunners of
much that is most characteristic of the British philosophy of the twentieth
century, was also a discussion of issues that had preoccupied philosophers
in Britain, Europe and America for several centuries at least.
To look at some of Moore’s other work is to complicate the picture
still further. Principia Ethica (1903) shows the same determination to be
clear, detailed and concrete: its epigraph from Butler — ‘Everything is
what it is and not another thing’ — became a slogan for common-sense,
analytical philosophy; but it also allies itself with Bradley and with H. A.
Prichard in defending the autonomy of ethics against the naturalist
utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill.
Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) was one of the great and
dominant texts in philosophy at the turn of the century. Here was an
Anglicised Hegelian Idealist, at once complaining that the intellect
characteristically distorts reality and setting out to show by systematic
reasoning what the nature of reality is and must be like. In such papers as
‘The Conception of Reality’ (1917) 1 Moore analyses the arguments (and
the ambiguities) by which Bradley arrived at his surprising and dramatic
conclusions that Time and Space are unreal, that external relations are
logically impossible, that nothing short of a complete description of
everything can be more than partially true.
1 Ibid.
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But Bradley was not the only English-speaking Idealist of that genera-
tion, and Moore was far from being the only or the only kind of critic of
Idealism. In America Josiah Royce defended an epistemological version
of Idealism which helped to provoke C. S. Peirce and William James into
their pragmatist and empiricist doctrines. Like Moore, they emphasised
the complexity and subtlety of thought and its objects, against the monistic
tendencies of the Idealists. In Cambridge Moore and his near-contem-
poraries Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead were taught and influ-
enced by J. M. E. McTaggart, whose pluralist personal Idealism was
expounded with an analytical circumspection that remained characteristic
of Cambridge philosophy long after nearly everybody had ceased to
believe that the universe is a series of eternal selves.
There are still further obstacles to the production of any neat diagram
of early twentieth-century philosophy. Herbert Spencer was still alive, and
Darwin’s evolutionary biology continued to preoccupy a varied group of
philosophers in England and America. In continental Europe there was
Bergson’s vitalist philosophy, which had links both with the voluntarist
strand in pragmatism and with the insistence of the Idealists that the
intellect distorts reality. The growth of the natural sciences also had a
decisive effect on E. H. Haeckel, whose Riddle of the Universe (1899) was
one of the most widely read books of its day.
Far more important for the immediate future of philosophy were the
preoccupations of Husserl, Brentano, Meinong, and above all Frege. All
these were concerned, though they differed in their idioms and in their
conclusions, with a cluster of questions in ontology and epistemology which
were to be among the central themes of philosophy in the subsequent
decades. In retrospect Frege looms largest in this group. His researches
in the foundations of arithmetic pioneered a road that led to Russell
and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13), one of the landmarks
in the whole of philosophical history.
The consequences of this attempt to reduce mathematics to logic, and
of Russell’s major supporting works, spread far beyond that field into
almost every area of philosophy. F. P. Ramsey, whose posthumous col-
lection of papers The Foundations of Mathematics (1931) was one of the
products of the same enterprise, described Russell’s * theory of descriptions ’
as ‘a paradigm of philosophy’. Having solved the puzzle about fictional
and imaginary entities by formal deductive analysis, and so annihilated
Meinong’s world of shadowy entities, Russell and his friends were
ambitious to achieve greater conquests still by wielding Russell’s slogan
that one should wherever possible substitute logical constructions out of
known entities for unknown and inferred entities. Russell’s The Analysis of
Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927) were contributions to this
programme. Mind was seen as reducible to behaviour, and material objects
to ‘sense-data’. Analysis was the watchword: logic was ‘the essence of
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philosophy The achievements of physicists, logicians and mathematicians
provided the stimulus to philosophers that had once been provided by
theological, ethical and biological preoccupations.
Moore was much less programmatic than Russell, but he dealt with
some of the same topics and used similar methods. His Philosophical Studies,
collected in 1922, treat, among other things, of ‘The Nature and Reality
of the Objects of Perception’, and ‘ External and Internal Relations’ in an
informal, but nevertheless rigorous, logical idiom. (The latter paper
introduces the notion of entailment which was to continue to be discussed
at Cambridge and elsewhere until the present day; but it did so in the
context of an enquiry into and a refutation of the Idealist doctrine that all
relations are internal.)
Here again we must pause to look at links that cross time, space and
subject-matter. The reductive epistemology of Russell and his followers
had been foreshadowed in outline by the classical British Empiricists
and by J. S. Mill, and in greater detail by some scientifically oriented
writers of the late nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Ernst
Mach’s Science of Mechanics (1883) was translated into English in 1893,
one year after the appearance of the influential and widely read The
Grammar of Science by Karl Pearson. An English edition of Hertz’s
Principles of Mechanics (1894) was published in 1899. These works are
of such a date and of such a character as to refute any suggestion that the
‘Cambridge Analysts’ were introducing something wholly unprecedented
into philosophy.
The same works have a further importance for the philosophical history
of this period, and one which again connects British and continental
philosophy closely together. The stream of positivistic empiricism in
England became a flood-tide only when the influence of the ‘Vienna
Circle’ and of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was felt and
was absorbed.
Ludwig Wittgenstein came to Manchester to do research in engineering
in 1908. His growing interest in logic and the foundations of mathematics
led him to Cambridge to work with Russell, who wrote an Introduction
to the Tractatus when it was published with an English translation in 1922.
Here was a manifesto which had all the confidence and all the trenchancy
that could be hoped for by a band of radical philosophical reformers, or
all the arrogance and all the dogmatism that could be feared and castigated
by the many surviving exponents of older traditions:
the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive.
I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved.
Defenders and detractors alike were tempted to forget the next sentence:
And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the
fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.
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Both sides attended more closely to the claim that most questions and
propositions of traditional philosophy were senseless, and to the famous
last section of the Tractatus :
6.53. The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can
be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do
with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something
metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs
in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not
have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only
strictly correct method.
6.54. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally
recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over
them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
But the Tractatus is much more than a manifesto. It is already recog-
nised as a classic work of philosophy. Like many another classic, it is
obscure, compressed, lending itself to rival interpretations, needing some
at least of the abundance of commentary and annotation that has already
flowed over it.
Here it is possible to do no more than to mention some of its themes
and doctrines. Wittgenstein’s own summary in the Preface declares that
the book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the
method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic
of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, (see
above) thereof one must be silent.
His acknowledgement to * Frege’s great works and the writings of my
friend Mr Bertrand Russell’ prepares the reader for the preoccupation
with problems of mathematics, logic, meaning and necessity. Disciples and
critics have found in it a ‘picture theory of meaning’, according to which
language mirrors the world, and what a sentence has in common with a
state of affairs is a form or structure which cannot, therefore, be explained
or expressed in language, but which ‘shows itself’; and the theory of
‘Logical Atomism’ which Russell had expounded, with acknowledge-
ments to Wittgenstein, in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) — the
theory that analysis requires the existence of ‘ultimate simples’. Debate
continues on whether Wittgenstein can be credited or debited with such
explicit and formal theories ; the book is aphoristic, literary, apophtheg-
matic, rather than systematic and formal in the manner of Russell and
Frege. What is clearer is that it offers an account of the nature of logical
necessity which was to be characteristic of later positivist thought. The
propositions of mathematics and logic are represented as tautologies,
which, because they are true in all possible states of affairs, ‘say nothing ’
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about the world. A contradiction, which is true in no state of affairs, is
also senseless. Sense belongs only to ‘ the propositions of natural science ’
which are ‘ what can be said
Wittgenstein’s logicist colleagues and disciples were less happy about the
mystical streak in the Tractatus, the references to God and death and
‘what is higher’. They were content to note that Wittgenstein consigned
these topics to that realm ‘whereof one cannot speak’ and they did not
too closely enquire whether he would have dissented from Ramsey’s
remark that ‘Theology and Absolute Ethics are two famous subjects
which we have realised to have no real objects’. It was Ramsey again who
wrote: ‘What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.’
Wittgenstein did not belong to the Vienna Circle, though he was
acquainted with some of its members, but there was certainly some com-
munity of spirit between the Tractatus and the more straightforwardly and
formally positivist writings of Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Feigl, Hahn and
the other members of what became a concerted movement of empiricist,
anti-metaphysical philosophers. It is important not to exaggerate the
unity of this school : there were internal debates and differences about the
exact nature of the verification- or meaning-criterion by which meta-
physics was to be banished into limbo, and about the nature of the ‘basic
propositions’ or ‘protocol-statements’ on or out of which the world was
to be ‘logically constructed’. But they did constitute a conscious and
formal school: they met for discussions, they held conferences, they
published journals.
Similar ideas were introduced to English readers by Ogden and
Richards in The Meaning of Meaning. The first edition of 1923 already
alludes to Wittgenstein and Russell, and also (to remind us again of
deeper roots) to C. S. Peirce. But the somewhat casual references to
these writers give no sufficient impression of what the work must have
owed to philosophical discussion in Cambridge and the debt that such
discussions owed in turn to news from Vienna.
It was not until 1936, with the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language,
Truth and Logic, that the general reader in English-speaking countries
had access to a systematic and avowed presentation of the doctrines of the
Vienna School. Ayer’s preface begins by acknowledging that his views
‘derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein which
are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and
David Hume’. He goes on to express a large debt to Moore, though he
recognises that Moore and his followers ‘are not prepared to adopt such
a thoroughgoing phenomenalism as I do, and that they take a rather
different view of the nature of philosophical analysis. The philosophers
with whom I am in the closest agreement are those who compose the
“Viennese circle”, under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, and are
commonly known as logical positivists.’
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In spite of these generous acknowledgements, and of many more
specific references in the text of the book. Language, Truth and Logic had
much of the air of a radically new departure in philosophy, and it was
received or rejected as such by many philosophers of all persuasions. It is
a masterpiece of clarity and force of exposition, and though it is doubtful
whether it contains an original idea of any importance, it did a great
service to the progress of philosophy by presenting, in a form in which
they could be clearly understood and therefore clearly discussed, ideas
which were as important as they were unfamiliar to most philosophers of
the day. It is a mark of the book’s incisiveness and of the grace of its
style, as well as of the immense readership that these qualities won for it,
that only in very recent years has it been possible for professional philo-
sophers to persuade their non-philosophical friends that there are any
philosophers in England who are not logical positivists, or that logical
positivism owes anything to any other text than this.
Ayer is certainly thoroughgoing. The first chapter is entitled ‘The
Elimination of Metaphysics’ and its final sentence reads: ‘The traditional
disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are
unfruitful.’ The book offers ‘a definitive solution of the problems which
have been the chief source of controversy between philosophers in the past ’.
Metaphysics is eliminated by a revised version of the Vienna School’s
criterion of literal meaningfulness:
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is
the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any
given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it pur-
ports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under
certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.
If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assump-
tion of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever con-
cerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is,
if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition. The sentence expressing it may be
emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant. And with regard to
questions the procedure is the same. We enquire in every case what observations
would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be
discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far
as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical
appearance may suggest that it does.
Ayer acknowledges the kinship of his iconoclasm with Hume’s on-
slaught on the metaphysics of the medieval schools:
Of Hume we may say not merely that he was not in practice a metaphysician, but
that he explicitly rejected metaphysics. We find the strongest evidence of this in the
passage with which he concludes his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
‘If’, he says, ‘we take in our hand any volume; of divinity, or school metaphysics,
for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity
or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of
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fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing
but sophistry and illusion.’ What is this but a rhetorical version of our own thesis
that a sentence which does not express either a formally true proposition or an
empirical hypothesis is devoid of literal significance?
The chapter giving ‘A Critique of Ethics and Theology’ was perhaps
the most blood-stirring or spine-chilling. Christians were offered the cold
comfort of an assurance that their beliefs shared with those of atheists
and agnostics the stigma of being ‘not false, but senseless’. Moral judge-
ments were described as ‘partly expressions of feeling, partly commands’.
‘Ethics without propositions’ became the slogan of a school of moral
philosophers. The most detailed and careful presentation of this account
of morality was given by C. L. Stevenson in Ethics and Language. It
became fashionable for bright young things to use the word ‘emotive’ or
the crushing retort ‘that’s a value judgement’ as a stopper of all serious
conversation about morals, politics, religion, literature and art. (Many of
them are still doing it, though their brightness is tarnished and their
youth has faded.)
Ayer’s phenomenalism was representative of his doctrines on all the
main problems of philosophy. He offered reductions, analyses in the
Russellian manner: minds, numbers, concepts, propositions, material
things, past and future, all were logical constructions, not inferred
entities. No other possibility was considered.
Even outside the ranks of the banner-waving positivists, much of the
philosophical work of the ’thirties was of a similar temper. Gilbert Ryle in
‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’ (1932) 1 underlined some lessons
of the current distinction between sentence forms and the ‘ logical forms ’
of the facts that the sentences expressed. Plato’s universals were banished
by diagnosing the linguistic confusions that had given them birth. Ryle
had some misgivings about the way in which his work was pointing:
But as confession is good for the soul, I must admit that I do not very much relish
the conclusions towards which these conclusions point. I would rather allot to
philosophy a sublimer task than the detection of the sources in linguistic idioms of
recurrent misconstructions and absurd theories. But that it is at least this I cannot
feel any serious doubt.
In 1936, the same year as Language, Truth and Logic, there appeared an
article that pointed in another direction: John Wisdom’s ‘Philosophical
Perplexity’. 2 Wisdom’s work had already passed through several phases.
His book Problems of Mind and Matter (1934) belonged to an earlier
Cambridge, the Cambridge of Ward and Stout and McTaggart, to whom
he was linked by the teaching of Moore and Broad. In a series of papers
on ‘ Logical Constructions ’ ( Mind , 193 1-3) he had joined in the fashionable
search for logical equations as solutions of philosophical problems.
Now, after a spell at St Andrews, he had returned to Cambridge to find
1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1931-2. * Ibid., 1936-7.
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Wittgenstein in full cry, and the quarry included ‘ the author of the Tract at us ’.
According to this second Wittgenstein, he and his colleagues had rightly
identified ‘misunderstandings of the logic of our language’ ( Tract atus ,
Preface) as the source of philosophical confusion, but they had misunder-
stood the nature of the disease and the mode of treatment appropriate to it.
They had themselves been misled by language, misled into thinking that
philosophical questions and statements were as similar to scientific and
mathematical statements in their logical character as in their forms of
expression. ‘ The craving for generality ’ could be mortified by attention to
details and differences. Analysis must give way to description before
philosophers could be freed from ‘ the idea that the meaning of a word is
an object’ and other beguiling illusions.
Wittgenstein’s new ideas soon gained wide currency, partly by oral
transmission, partly by the circulation of typescript notes of his lectures
(the ‘Blue and Brown Books’, which were not published until 1958), but
mainly by the work of Wisdom and other pupils. Wisdom exaggerated
his great debt to Wittgenstein: from Wittgenstein he had learned that
philosophers spoke paradoxically, putting familiar expressions to un-
familiar uses and hence misleading themselves and others. But he saw
more clearly than Wittgenstein had seen that in these paradoxes there is
penetration as well as confusion. Here Wisdom was developing the
lessons of Wittgenstein’s own remark in the Tractatus that ‘what the
solipsist means is of course correct’. Wisdom elaborated these points in
numerous articles in the philosophical journals, and notably in a series on
‘Other Minds’ {Mind, 1940-3). After the unhistorical and often anti-
historical bias of the positivists, here was somebody who emphasised the
continuity of philosophy: the links between the new linguistic epistemo-
logy and the metaphysical ontology of the traditional philosophers.
His philosophical practice already adumbrated his later account of ‘The
Metamorphosis of Metaphysics’ (British Academy, 1961).
Language, Truth and Logic continued to receive critical attention both
from traditionalist thinkers like A. C. Ewing, who kept Idealism alive
in Cambridge while all about him were succumbing to what C. D. Broad
called ‘the syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein’s flute’ and from
others such as M. Lazerowitz and C. L. Stevenson, who were sympathetic
to Ayer’s radicalism but who wished to prune some of his excesses.
Broad himself continued to write philosophy in the manner of the
Cambridge analysts of a slightly earlier day; he allowed in spite of the
new critics that there was scope for ‘ speculative philosophy’ as well as for
the ‘critical philosophy’ that he practised himself. Such books as The
Mind and its Place in Nature (1925) and An Examination of McTaggart’s
Philosophy (1933-8) have virtues of sanity, acuteness and disinterestedness
which can now be seen more clearly than they were seen by partisans of
the new movements of the ’twenties and ’thirties.
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Meanwhile in Oxford there flourished a school of common-sense, down-
to-earth philosophers who were unknowingly preparing the way for the
‘linguistic’ philosophy that took Oxford by storm in the years just before
and after the second world war. Cook Wilson, like W. E. Johnson and
Moore at Cambridge, emphasised the importance of ‘ normal usage ’ before
this became a modish slogan. Joachim, Prichard, Joseph, J. A. Smith and
(among a younger generation) H. H. Price differed from each other in
many ways, but they had in common a determination to be concrete,
detailed and sensible, to avoid the large enthusiasms of some nineteenth-
century metaphysicians and to deal with problems thoroughly and piece-
meal. These virtues, and the corresponding limitations, were to be
transmitted to the younger philosophers who would acclimatise ‘Cam-
bridge philosophy’ to its Oxford environment.
R. G. Collingwood, also in Oxford, kept alive an interest in philosophy
of history and in aesthetics, as well as in natural philosophy and the
traditional problems of metaphysics, while his younger contemporaries
concentrated on more narrowly logical and epistemological issues and
did not even read the Continental authors on whom he drew — Croce,
Gentile, Dilthey and Hegel. Collingwood’s Autobiography (1939) gives
a partial but valuably corrective picture of Oxford philosophy between
the wars. Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) and some of
the works of Whitehead (e.g. Process and Reality, 1929) were grand
metaphysical productions which seemed to more fashionable philosophers
merely grandiose.
The neglect of these thinkers and their themes was accompanied by a
disregard of the Continental authors to whom they were more nearly akin.
The complaint of the general public that academic philosophers ignored
all that was most important and most vital in the general intellectual life
of the century had great plausibility. Marx was read by economists and
by the politically active; Nietzsche by those whose primary interests were
literary rather than philosophical; Kierkegaard by theologians and
philosophical amateurs; Freud by everybody. But none of these thinkers,
with the possible exception of Freud, was even on the fringe of the
consciousness of many practising philosophers in those years.
During the inter-war years there was correspondingly a comparative
neglect of historical studies in philosophy, and of nearly all fields of
philosophical enquiry outside logic and epistemology: ethics, philosophy
of religion, philosophy of history, aesthetics, political philosophy. It
would be possible to draw up a long and distinguished list of exceptions,
but they would nearly all be the work of men who were out of sympathy
with the prevailing philosophical mood. A. E. Taylor, John Burnet,
Henry Jackson, F. M. Comford and Sir David Ross made outstanding
contributions to the study of Greek philosophy, but Ross and Taylor were
old-fashioned in their independent philosophical work and the others
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were not original philosophers at all. Work on the history of modem
philosophy was also largely confined to those who drew their philo-
sophical sustenance from the earlier periods that they wrote about, or
who were inactive in substantive philosophy. G. R. G. Mure wrote on
Hegel, A. C. Ewing on Idealism, N. Kemp Smith on Descartes; Colling-
wood’s original works ( The Idea of Nature, Speculum Mentis, The New
Leviathan ) were systematically historical in method and approach. But
after Russell’s Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) there was for several decades no
full-scale work on a great philosopher of the past by a leading philosopher
of the modem movement.
The philosophy of religion was similarly isolated. F. R. Tennant’s
Philosophical Theology (1928-30) had something of the concreteness and
common sense of the Cambridge analysts of his day, but like Sir Charles
Oman, H. H. Farmer and others he worked independently of the main
movements of thought among his philosophical contemporaries.
In spite of Russell’s active concern with political and social questions,
much the same is true of political philosophy in this period, but an
important exception to this and to many tempting generalisations about
twentieth-century philosophy is provided by Sir Karl Popper. Though
it was not translated into English until 1958, his Logic of Scientific
Discovery ( Logik der Forschung, 1935) gives him a distinguished place as
a philosopher connected with the Vienna School but always independent
and critical of its slogans. His thesis that falsifiability and not verifiability
is the mark of scientific propositions became widely known and accepted
outside the ranks of professional philosophers even before it was available
in English.
Even better known is The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), which
combined a detailed and highly critical consideration of Plato, Hegel
and Marx with a philosophical defence of ‘the open society’ and of a
piecemeal, empirical approach to social and political problems. This is
almost the only important philosophical work of its day to have direct
relevance to the larger historical and political events of the century, and
like the same author’s The Poverty of Historicism it has been widely read
by historians and social scientists and by the intelligent public at large, to
a degree that can be rivalled by few recent works of philosophy.
Like Laird in his Recent Philosophy, any chronicler of twentieth-century
philosophy must apologise for mentioning so many names and for
omitting so many names. Eddington and Jeans, Poincare, Jeffreys and
Keynes, Tarski and Godel, Dewey and Schiller, Reichenbach, Hempel
and Bridgman, Gilson and Maritain, Bosanquet, Green and Rashdall,
C. I. Lewis and Waismann all deserve more than the mere mention which
is all that can here be given to them. Most of them are important, and
the others are important at least as having been thought by many to be
important. The omissions are as varied as the inclusions. To add still more
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names would be to reinforce an emphasis on the variety of twentieth-
century philosophy without finding reason to withdraw a complementary
insistence on the cross-connections which give it the unity of a conversa-
tion. The same unity and the same variety can be seen in what has
happened and is still happening in the post-war philosophy that falls
outside the scope of this chapter and this volume.
Wittgenstein’s Preface to the Philosophical Investigations is dated 1945,
but the book was not published until 1953, two years after his death. It is
a landmark by reference to which most of the most significant post-war
philosophy can be located, whether by comparison or by contrast. Many
recent writers are pupils and followers of Wittgenstein: John Wisdom,
Rush Rhees, Morris Lazerowitz, Norman Malcolm, Elizabeth Anscombe,
Peter Geach. Numerous others who were not his pupils and are not
his disciples nevertheless show and acknowledge his deep influence:
D. M. MacKinnon, D. F. Pears, Stuart Hampshire and P. F. Strawson are
prominent examples. Two of the most influential figures on the post-war
philosophical scene, Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, have written important
books and articles in which his name is seldom or never mentioned, but
whose evident kinship with his work calls for no recondite explanation.
A. J. Ayer and H. H. Price at Oxford, R. B. Braithwaite and Casimir
Lewy at Cambridge, like many others in other places, have produced
work that is more in the spirit of the earlier Cambridge philosophy of
Russell, Moore and Broad than in that of the later Wittgenstein. There
are two large classes of active philosophers who are firmly opposed to the
work and influence of the later Wittgenstein: the traditionalist meta-
physicians (Ewing, Blanshard, Mure) and logical empiricists and philo-
sophical logicians (Quine, Goodman, Carnap) whose interests link them
closely with the Vienna Circle, the Tractatus or Principia Mathematica.
This account began with a warning against parochialism in time. It
must end with a warning against parochialism in space. It has become
commonplace to deplore the gulf between Anglo-Saxon and Continental
European philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. But the differences are
exaggerated both by critics of contemporary British philosophy who hold
up Sartre and Camus and Heidegger and Jaspers as models to imitate, and
also by neo-positivist and linguistic philosophers who hold up the same
Continental philosophers as warnings of the snares that threaten those who
are not vigilant in the preservation of their emancipation from ancient
metaphysics.
Since most philosophers at all times and in all places are bad philo-
sophers, and since even the best philosophers are occasionally guilty of
folly and absurdity, it is easy for both parties in this wrangle to compile
sottisiers from the works of their opponents’ heroes. But the idea that
either side has a monopoly of serious concern with the central problems of
philosophy is one that will not survive the examination that it is at last
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receiving. German-, French- and English-speaking philosophers have read
the same philosophical classics and inherited from them substantially the
same preoccupations. There are differences of idiom between one place
and another, but they are no more important than the differences of
idiom between one time and another, or between different philosophers
who share the same time and place. Not all philosophers at all times and
in all places are equally interested in all philosophical problems, and the
differences of stress between Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophers at
the present time are simply one illustration of this truism.
Jean-Paul Sartre is one of a number of Continental philosophers in
whom British philosophers are becoming increasingly interested. The
nature of his work exemplifies the wider situation. His Esquisse d'une
thiorie des Emotions (1939, translated 1962) deals with problems in the
philosophy of mind which have been prominent in British and American
philosophy, where they have been associated, as they are by Sartre
himself, with the work of William James and Freud. It has been widely
recognised that V Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946, translated
1948) is relevant to contemporary discussion of the nature of moral
reasons and judgements. L'Etre et le neant combines these two fields of
interest, together with an epistemological preoccupation very close to
that of many British philosophers. One section is entitled V Existence
d’autrui — which would be a good title for a French edition of Wisdom’s
Other Minds. Meanwhile some of the work of Ayer and Ryle and Austin
and Wittgenstein is being read in Italy, Germany and France. The
conversation continues.
2. RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
The distinction between ‘ religious ’ and secular thought is probably unreal
and certainly difficult. The first half of the twentieth century seems, in
retrospect, to fall, in this respect, into two contrasting periods — before
1914 and after 1918 — the first characterised by a close relation between
philosophy and religion, the second by a tendency to fall apart, influential
philosophers holding that metaphysical statements are meaningless and
theologians that Revelation needs no support from human reason. At the
opening of the century Herbert Spencer was still alive and his agnostic
theology of the ‘ Unknowable’, which he derived from the Anglican Dean
Mansel, was under fire from the rising school of Idealists. Positivism, of the
Comtist type, was widely held as a philosophy which harmonised with the
scientific outlook, and the proposition that the only genuine knowledge is
scientific knowledge was widely accepted. About this time the word
‘Naturalism’ came into use as a general term for a scientific metaphysic
which, with more or less emphasis, rejected the idea of God. Since this
controversy on Naturalism was about the nature of truth and the limits of
knowledge, it concerned many thinkers who would not have claimed to be
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theologians. The institution of the ‘Gifford Lectures’, which were ex-
plicitly devoted to the consideration of belief in God in the light of reason
without resort to authority or alleged revelation, secured that the great
themes of God, Freedom and Immortality were continually being
examined from many points of view. The second period saw the emergence
of a new form of naturalism which maintained that statements which
could not be verified or ‘falsified’ by sense experience were unmeaning.
This extreme position proved untenable, but a prevailing view among
English-speaking philosophers is that metaphysics, and consequently
rational theology, are not possible. One result of this has been to concen-
trate religious thinking more on the idea of revelation and the nature
of religious experience. A sign of the times is that, whereas in the early
years of the century the Philosophy of Religion threatened to take the
place of lectures on doctrine, in more recent days Systematic Theology
and Dogmatic Theology have resumed their sway in the theological
curriculum.
Before passing on to a brief account of theological developments, some
reference must be made to influences which affected most of the religious
thinking in the half century. Two writers of an earlier period, Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, stimulated many religious minds. The philosophy which
has been labelled ‘Existentialism’ is alleged to stem from Kierkegaard, no
doubt correctly, but the forms which it takes are so protean, ranging from
Atheism to Catholicism, that it remains a puzzle. Perhaps its most
obvious effect has been to reinforce the reaction against reason in religion
and to encourage the emphasis on will, decision and ‘commitment’ in
religious experience. A comparison between Kierkegaard and Blaise
Pascal is illuminating; both were converted by a saltum mortale which
took no account of ‘the God of the philosophers’, both were men of
exceptional intellect and literary power. Another pervading influence is the
new development of psychology. Sigmund Freud was of the opinion that
he had proved religion to be an illusion, a ‘universal neurosis’, and it
cannot be denied that he has caused much searching of heart and revision
of concepts among those theologians who have given serious attention to
his writings, but how much of his theory of the Unconscious will survive
the criticism, which continues, we cannot tell; the same remark applies,
with even greater force, to the work of his pupil and rival C. G. Jung.
Without doubt, both have important contributions to make to our
understanding of religion; the analytical philosophers could perhaps help
us to estimate the significance of the symbols and myths which they
employ. Some continuing influence on religious thought has come from
the attempts to find some ‘meaning’ in history. Benedetto Croce and
Giovanni Gentile were Idealists who attributed absolute value to history,
in the sense that to them history was the manifestation of Spirit. This
point of view obviously has a direct bearing on the Christian doctrine of
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Providence. So too have the speculations of Oswald Spengler and
Arnold Toynbee on the nature of history. Spengler’s Der Untergang des
Abendlandes was published at the end of the first world war and caused a
sensation by its pessimism and atheism. Toynbee’s elaborate Study of
History has had a notable influence on religious thinking, largely because,
while more learned and comprehensive than Spengler, he dwells on the
enormous importance of religion for the understanding of history and
outlines, as it were, a doctrine of Providence for scientific historians.
Very much of the best thinking of the time was directed towards the
question of the nature of religion, the conception of God in the light of
modem science and the bearing of new knowledge on the traditional
doctrines of Christianity. Pringle Patterson’s Idea of God, which restated
the doctrine of theism from the Idealist point of view, had considerable
influence and was a distinguished essay in interpretation. Clement C. J.
Webb devoted a long life of reflection to the study of the history of natural
theology and the philosophical aspects of the belief in divine personality.
Dr Tennant, in his Philosophical Theology and other shorter writings,
brought an acute and analytic intelligence to bear on the central dogmas
of religion, approaching them with the presuppositions rather of the
realistic Cambridge school than with those of idealism. Hastings Rashdall,
in his Theory of Good and Evil and his Doctrine of the Atonement, gave to
the world two substantial works in which deep theological and philo-
sophical knowledge were blended. Though an idealist, he was opposed to
absolute idealism and held the empirical idealism of Berkeley. To these
names we may add that of W. G. de Burgh whose writings on the relation
between morality and religion and on the place of reason in religion. The
Life of Reason, came at the end of the period and have the interest of sum-
ming up a tendency of thought in which many thinkers had taken their
part. Nor may we forget two philosophers who concentrated attention on
the moral argument for a religious view of the world — Professor W. R.
Sorley and Professor A. E. Taylor. The latter, who had begun his philo-
sophical career as a disciple of Bradley, illustrates a movement of religious
thought which had wider significance than the development of an indi-
vidual mind. He abandoned the pantheistic conclusions of absolutism
and ended with a view which was at least not far removed from that of
Thomas Aquinas.
All the authors mentioned in the preceding paragraph were concerned
to maintain the validity of religious experience and the essential truth
of the central affirmations of Christianity, but it cannot be said that in all
cases the theologians were grateful for the services of the would-be de-
fender of their science. The modifications and limitations which some of
the philosophers of religion would have introduced into the accepted
doctrines appeared to many to be dangerous departures from revealed
truth and to this feeling we must ascribe the fact that two of the best
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minds of the Anglican church in these years. Dr Rashdall and Dr Ten-
nant, were not given the recognition and influence they deserved. The
times in fact were not propitious for the calm discussion of religious ideas,
for from the outset of the century the Christian religion was passing
through a severe crisis in which, as it seemed, there were more urgent
problems than those which the detached thinkers debated. The leaders of
the churches were confronted with a wide falling away of the people
from public worship and from any serious allegiance to ‘organised
religion’. Though this fact is not the only important factor which affected
religious thought from 1900 to 1950 it is one to be constantly borne in
mind.
Religion, being a social activity as well as a subjective experience, is neces-
sarily more directly linked than philosophy with the vicissitudes of history,
and the crisis of western civilisation which culminated in the two world
wars is reflected very clearly in the somewhat abrupt changes in theological
currents which have occurred. The nineteenth century bequeathed to the
twentieth two unsolved theological problems. The first was how to recon-
cile the results of natural science with the world-view which seemed to be
implied in the Christian faith, and the second was how to assimilate the
results of the historical criticism of the Bible and the conclusions of the
students of comparative religion.
When the century began, a powerful and earnest body of Protestant
Christians in Great Britain, America, Germany and most of the European
states had adopted a theology which is named, chiefly by its critics,
Liberal Protestantism. The principal features of this type of Christian
belief were a minimising of the supernatural and dogmatic aspects of
Christianity and a ‘return to the Gospels’. In them, it was thought, the
dominant idea was that of the Kingdom of God. Liberal Protestantism,
therefore, placed the Kingdom of God at the centre of its interpretation
of the religion of Christ, but it concentrated attention on the coming of
the Kingdom in this present world excluding, so far as might be, those
elements in the Gospels which suggest the ‘other-worldly’ aspect of the
Kingdom. The ‘social gospel’ became identified in the minds of some with
the idea of progress, which, in the first decade of the century, was re-
garded as almost certain, if not inevitable. The greatest name associated
with Liberal Protestantism is that of Hamack, whose History of Dogma
is one of the major influences in the intellectual ferment of the time. In
this work, distinguished by wide learning, Hamack sustained the thesis
that the original Christian experience which created the New Testament
had been so interpreted by Greek philosophy that it had been transformed
from its primitive simplicity into a series of theological propositions and
an elaborate sacramental and hierarchical system. The popular Das Wesen
des Christentums, which reproduced lectures given by Hamack to students
in Berlin, was an eloquent plea for a simplified Christian faith consisting
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in two fundamental affirmations — the fatherhood of God and the brother-
hood of men. It would be unjust to Hamack and the very numerous
‘liberal’ theologians who were in sympathy with him to say that they
ignored such weighty matters as sin, redemption and the Incarnation;
they aimed rather at a revaluation of these doctrines in the light of what
they supposed to be the simple message of Jesus. T. R. Glover’s The
Jesus of History, which was widely read in England and America, is an
attractive example of the writing produced by this type of Christian
scholarship. The study of the religions of the Hellenistic age, to which
Glover also contributed, was an additional factor in the problem. The
researches of Reitzenstein, Cumont and others led to a clearer understand-
ing of the importance of the ‘ mystery cults ’ and the question was raised
how far the transformation of the primitive Christian gospel was due to
the influence of the mystery religions and whether the process had not
already been begun by St Paul, who was alleged by some to have bor-
rowed ideas and phrases from pagan rituals.
The writings of Hamack were in part the occasion of the modernist
movement in the Roman Catholic church. Catholic scholars in France,
Germany, England and Italy were conscious of the need for relating the
teaching and practice of the church with modem scientific and historical
knowledge, and some at least were dissatisfied with the intransigent atti-
tude of ecclesiastical authority to all concessions to the thought of the
new age. At the same time, they were firmly convinced that the church
was the providential bearer and protector of the life of the spirit. The
Abbe Loisy, meeting the challenge of Hamack and Liberal Protestantism,
attempted to develop a new kind of Catholic apologetic in his two short
but effective books, L'Evangile et Veglise and Autour (Tun petit livre.
Accepting a criticism of the sources at least as drastic as Harnack’s, he
tried to show that the gospel and the church were inseparable and that
the living tradition of worship in the church was the substance of the
Christian religion. In England two eminent theologians were associated
with the modernist movement, George Tyrrell and Baron F. von Hiigel.
The latter, though certainly a modernist in his critical views, was probably
not a philosophical modernist; and he escaped the papal condemnation
which overtook his friends. For the Roman church, or at least the Vati-
can, repudiated the new apologetic and the programme of accommodation
to modem knowledge. Modernism was banned as a heresy in 1907 and
there followed a drastic ‘purge’ of the seminaries and the parochial
clergy. To all appearance the movement was defeated in the Roman church
and perhaps it had in the end its greatest influence on the liberal wing of
the Anglo-Catholic section of the Anglican church. Loisy and Tyrrell
continued to write. The former became more agnostic than believing and
his Birth of Christianity would be hard to reconcile with his Gospel and the
Church.
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The social gospel had a different complexion in the Anglican com-
munion. Its exponents, the so-called Christian Socialists, Charles Gore
and Henry Scott Holland, based their teaching on the Incarnation and on
the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation to the defence and explanation
of which Gore’s principal books were devoted. Bishop Gore represents
one of the chief trends of Anglican thought in the first thirty years of the
century and was one of the outstanding personal influences. The liberalism
of his earlier period, when he contributed to Lux Mundi, was always of a
strictly limited character and in later life he stood for an orthodoxy which
was prepared to silence those clerics who went farther in criticism of
traditional doctrines than the acceptance of the positions of Lux Mundi.
Nevertheless, he was always half a liberal and it is interesting to note that
his ‘kenotic’ theory of the Incarnation is now repudiated by Anglo-
Catholic theologians who find this leader of the Catholic party of yesterday
too liberal for today.
The first world war was a heavy blow to the optimism of Liberal Pro-
testantism. The dream of the permeation of society by the principles of
Christianity was clouded though not destroyed. The League of Nations
was, in great measure, the creation of Christian idealism and it failed
chiefly because the spiritual power which made it was not sufficient to
sustain it. The hopes of the 1920s and the disillusionments of the 1930s
had their repercussions in religious thought, but there were also other
disturbing causes which arose within theology itself.
The ‘historical Jesus’ who leads mankind into the Kingdom is the
central figure of idealistic Christianity. He is a universal figure, modem
at any rate in the sense that He speaks in language which has significance
for our time. This figure had been constructed by selecting from the Gospels
those traits and words which are consonant with our ways of thinking and
dismissing the rest. The Apocalyptic school of New Testament interpreta-
tion protested against this picture on the ground that it left out the most
important element in the story. They pointed out that the first three Gospels
are deeply imbued with the ideas and imagery of Jewish Apocalyptic.
Albert Schweitzer caused the greatest perturbation with his book The
Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which he insisted that Jesus was ‘a Jew
of the first century’. Other works, The Mysticism of St Paul in particular,
followed the clue of Apocalyptic, and the striking and attractive personality
of Schweitzer, together with his devoted labours as a medical missionary,
made him one of the most important religious spirits of our time. The
extreme Apocalyptic view of the Gospels has been criticised and eminent
scholars still reject it altogether, but on the whole it may be said that the
contentions of Schweitzer and those who agreed with him in his principal
positions, such as Professor Burkitt, have left a permanent mark on New
Testament interpretation and on the conception of the Kingdom of God
in the teaching and experience of Jesus.
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The question of the nature of the religious experience was raised, as
we have seen, by the new psychology and much active theological discus-
sion was directed to the refutation of the fundamental scepticism of the
Freudians. A positive contribution to the problem was made by Rudolf
Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, in which he developed a theory of ‘the
numinous’ as a distinctive feeling which exists at all levels from that of
unreasoning, shuddering dread to that of awe and reverence. Otto linked
his theory with the theology of Schleiermacher, the philosophy of Fichte
and the religion of Luther and carried his line of thought farther in a
penetrating study of Mysticism, Eastern and Western. For reasons not
easy to discover he had a larger following in England and America than
in Germany. He is one of the authors of the time whose writings will
probably be of permanent value and his doctrine of the ‘irrationality’
of the divine has not yet been placed in its proper perspective.
In the ferment of conflicting theories perhaps the systematic theologian
is at a disadvantage, because he finds no firm ground of accepted pre-
suppositions under his feet, but noteworthy efforts were made to restate
the orthodox doctrines for contemporary minds. Dr Gore, at the end of
his career, returned to the defence and exposition of the Christian beliefs
about God, Christ and the Church; Dr A. C. Headlam, beside books on
the Life and Teaching of Jesus and The Atonement, produced the first
volume of a system of theology which he did not live to finish. William
Temple, archbishop of Canterbury, was through most of these years
probably the most effective exponent of a liberal kind of orthodox theo-
logy. His wonderful powers of memory and of lucid statement enabled
him to pour out books in spite of his absorption in the practical work of
the church. Three of his books, Mens Creatrix, Christus Veritas, and
Nature, Man and God, contain the essence of his thinking and display the
movement of his mind from a ‘broad Church’ to a more traditional
standpoint.
We have already observed in passing that an interest in mysticism
appeared in more than one quarter and it may be suggested that one of the
causes operating to quicken this interest was the uncertainty both of the
social and of the intellectual background. Men sought for some basis for
life and found no reassuring answer in the idea of progress or in the dogmas
of the church. They looked within for the foundation and many found it
there. The list of distinguished students of mysticism is long and we can
notice only a few of them. Dr W. R. Inge, in his Christian Mysticism and
in his lectures on The Philosophy of Plotinus, did much to widen the
understanding of mysticism and to persuade those who were suspicious
of it that it was worthy of serious attention. Evelyn Underhill, in her
Mysticism and many other books, brought the words of great mystical
writers home to the general reader and had an influence on wide circles
through her spiritual conferences. Baron F. von Htigel was a religious
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thinker who brought a unique acquaintance with contemporary con-
tinental scholarship and philosophy to the service of a liberal Catholic
theology, but his most memorable book. The Mystical Element of Religion,
was a detailed study of St Catherine of Genoa on which was based an
investigation of the nature and significance of the mystical experience.
The London Society for the Study of Religion, which von Hiigel founded,
was a meeting-place for some of the finest spirits of the 1920s and 1930s.
Two of its members, Claude Montefiore, the Jewish scholar and student
of the Gospels, and Edwyn Bevan, the expert on Hellenistic culture and
author of a valuable book on Symbolism, must be named.
In the year following the end of the first world war Karl Barth came
into prominence and since that time his ‘dialectical’ theology of crisis
has been a major feature in Protestant thought. Though it can hardly be
said that Barth has any disciple or colleague who accepts all his positions
and he has conducted lively controversies with some who were at one
time members of his school, such as Gogarten and E. Brunner, his
influence may be discerned in the majority of Protestant theologians since
about 1925 either by way of agreement or of criticism. At the beginning
of our period there were those who placed so much faith in the philosophy
of religion that they expected it to take the position formerly occupied in
the church by dogmatic theology; at the end we find a powerful move-
ment which repudiates all connection with philosophy and presents a
dogmatic based on the Bible as the only divine truth open to men. The
conception of the Word of God is central for Barth and he draws a sharp
distinction between it and all the wisdom and spiritual experience of
humanity. The Word of God comes into the world as a direct and un-
related act of God. It is not to be criticised or validated by human reason,
which, being corrupt through the Fall, is incapable of passing judgement
on the Word. The root of Barth’s hostility to every form of philosophical
theology is his denial of the ‘ analogia entis’, that is, of any ‘image of God’
in man from which he could rise by a process of analogical inference to
any knowledge of God. The Barthian theology represents the extreme form
of the reaction against Liberal Protestantism and ‘rational’ religion. It is,
as the name ‘Theology of Crisis’ implies, a movement evoked by the
menace of the historical situation, but it may have more permanent
importance than that, for it is, on one side of its doctrine, a revival of
elements in Christianity which have their origin in St Paul.
A brief reference is all that space permits to the contribution of Russian
and Eastern Orthodox writers. The exile of many Christian scholars from
their native land has enriched the religious thought of the West. The names
of Franks and Bulgakov must be passed over with a bare mention though
the former has given us an excellent exposition of a philosophical type
of mysticism which is not afraid of the idea of the church. Nicolas
Berdyaev, in a long series of books, presented a philosophy of religion
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and a theology which attracted attention partly by its difference in method
and inspiration from all Western religious thought. Neither the Scholastic
logic and metaphysics nor the Reformation are among the fundamental
sources of his thought, which is moulded chiefly by the tradition of Ortho-
dox theology, Marxism and German philosophy. He writes rather as a
prophet than a philosopher though his works are full of references to
philosophy of all ages and many nations; he does not argue but states his
conclusions in an oracular manner. Towards the end of his life he was
interested in the permanent value and truth of the Apocalyptic vision of
history, a subject which he had approached through his two most signifi-
cant studies, The Meaning of History and The Destiny of Man. Probably
his really important contribution was his frank recognition of the neces-
sity of ‘ mythological thinking’ in religion and his attempt to elucidate the
nature of myth in Christian belief. It is remarkable that many orthodox
theologians hailed Berdyaev as an ally in spite of the obvious tendency of
his mind towards positions which would be distasteful to the traditional
dogmas both of Protestants and of Catholics. Many reasons may have
contributed to this, the stimulating character of Berdyaev’s thought, the
obscurity of his writing and the obtuseness of the orthodox.
Anyone who studies the religious thought of the first half of the
twentieth century with the purpose of finding clues to probable future
development may well judge that the most hopeful sign of the times is the
fact that the Ecumenical movement for Christian unity has emerged
from two world wars more vigorous than ever. In the sphere of theological
thinking, the Ecumenical spirit has shown itself by a change of method in
discussion. In place of controversy ‘dialogue’ is the fashion, and theo-
logians aim less at refuting errors of those who disagree with them and far
more at understanding. Anticipation of the 2nd Vatican Council (1962-4)
stimulated restatement of doctrinal positions in the Roman Catholic
church, which proved to open new approaches to such notable points of
difference as Justification; an example of eirenic analysis of this type is
the treatise by Dr Hans Kiing on the theology of Karl Barth ( Justification :
the Doctrine of Karl Barth). From the Protestant standpoint, memorable
studies of Systematic Theology have come from Reinhold Niebuhr and
Paul Tillich, both of whom exercised powerful influence in America
and Great Britain. Co-operation in religious thinking is a recognised fact
in the sphere of scholarship as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls (dis-
covered in i960); it is becoming more and more recognised in the central
concern of theology — the doctrine of the Being of God and of man’s
salvation. We may say, at least, that so far as Christian thought is
concerned the day of anathemas is done.
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PAINTING, SCULPTURE AND
ARCHITECTURE
Painting
T he first half of the twentieth century saw the creation of modem art,
that is, a revolutionary art which broke with traditional ideas of
representation; and since the public now looked at nature with eyes
conditioned by photography, the gap between artist and public widened.
Modem art grew out of impressionism and therefore began in Paris where
impressionism had matured; but when impressionism was shown on a
large scale at the Paris World Fair of 1900 it became international, and
modern movements began to develop in Germany, Italy and Russia while
the art of Paris itself became cosmopolitan. In France orthodox painting
continued to be organised round the annual Salon from which the jury
excluded all advanced work, so that the avant-garde had been forced to
organise on its own, setting up first ad hoc impressionist exhibitions, then
in 1884 the Salon des Independents and in 1903 the Salon d’Automne.
So art was organised into conservatives and radicals like contemporary
politics.
In 1900 two movements were dominant — divisionism and symbolism.
The divisionists following Seurat tried to make impressionism scientific
by painting in complementary colour dots which fused at a short distance.
The symbolists followed Gauguin into rejecting science for poetry; they
neither imitated nor analysed but sought a pictorial equivalent for nature
in broad colour zones closed by decorative lines. During the next ten
years three other artists came to be understood: Van Gogh, whose fierce
colour and tempestuous brush stroke keyed painting to the expression of
emotion; Cezanne, who, struggling to realise his sensations before a
motive by modulating small colour planes, combined the freshness of
impressionism with the solidity of a new classic structure; and the
Douanier Rousseau, whose naive realism invested objects with an aura of
wonder.
The years before 1905 seem in retrospect an introduction. While the
young Picasso drew circus folk in a style of emotive realism, Vuillard and
Bonnard wrote a postscript to impressionism in colourful interiors and
street scenes. The first modem art was created by the fauves between 1904
and 1908. A succes de scandale at the 1905 Salon d’Automne caused by
the violence of their colours gave them their name of ‘wild beasts’.
Colour was indeed their preoccupation. They used it raw, neither darkened
to model nor toned by atmosphere, with abrupt transitions and strident
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harmonies where those of the divisionists had been complementary, while
in order to further decorative richness and uninhibited brushwork their
pictures were flattened and their forms simplified.
There were two sides to fauvism, one exemplified by Vlaminck, the
other by Matisse. Vlaminck adapted the swift strokes and burning colour
which for Van Gogh had been the outcome of unbearable tension to
express passion for its own sake ; Matisse, starting with Gauguin, sought
by juxtaposing colours a new pictorial architectonic rendered lyrical by
arabesque. The impressionists had pioneered these ideas but used them
descriptively, while for the fauves nature was a starting-point and the
picture an end in itself. They recorded emotions, not facts; but by
emotion they meant aesthetic sensation for they had no story-telling,
social or moral aims. Though less radical in practice than in theory,
keeping much description, impressionist subject-matter and sunny mood,
their concern that colour as such should be the prime element in picture-
making still underlies the moiety of contemporary art.
Cubism was the logical counterpart of fauvism, a revolution of form
succeeding a revolution of colour, an intellectual against a sensuous,
a puritan against a hedonist art. It is generally accorded three over-
lapping phases: proto-cubism 1907-9, analytic cubism 1909-12 and
synthetic cubism 19 12-14.
Proto-cubism began with Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’ Avignon’ (1907), a
large picture of five nudes whose angular forms seem ‘hacked out with an
axe’. Perspective and chiaroscuro are replaced by a play of surface
planes which convey some sense of space and solidity without hollowing
the canvas. The heads of the two right-hand figures made more radical
deformations than any hitherto, probably under the influence of negro
sculpture. The nose of one is folded flat on the face and so asserts what
became a cubist principle — the right to portray objects simultaneously
from different viewpoints.
During 1908 Braque, influenced by Cezanne, experimented with con-
structing pictures from low-toned colour planes; thereafter the two
artists developed cubism side by side. In 1909 Picasso concentrated on
emphasising the surface planes of a nude model seen from shifting view-
points, so that the figure appeared faceted like a crystal and stressed
haptic rather than visual sensations. The object though simplified re-
mained distinguishable, but in 1910 planes were allowed to penetrate
the body, cut into each other and interweave with those of the back-
ground, so that the image became fragmented until the object ceased to be
identifiable and the artist had reached the brink of abstraction. But abstrac-
tion seemed an impoverishment and at once Picasso withdrew, though
only slightly. When in 191 1-12 the climax of analytic cubism was reached
in pictures such as Picasso’s ‘Clarinet Player’ and Braque’s ‘Portu-
guese’, the object which was the artist’s starting-point could still be
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glimpsed through the pattern of interpenetrating and translucent planes
and overall texture of little bricks of paint. So cubism remained a realist
movement not only because its point of departure (guitars and guitar
players, bottles, newspapers, etc.) were taken from the artist’s immediate
environment, but because appreciation of it turns on the interaction
between what is left of reality in the fragmented image and the structural
pattern.
In 1911-12 Picasso and Braque introduced into their pictures pieces of
wall-paper, newspaper, etc., thereby asserting the traditional medium to
be no more sacred than the traditional image and that pictures might be
made from anything, even rubbish. ‘Papier Colie’ (as this was called)
carried further the cubist probe into pictorial reality and space. The scrap
of newspaper was reality itself, not pictorial illusion, the scrap of wall-
paper painted with imitation wood-graining was at once reality and
illusion, while both were parts of the picture and so negated perspective,
emphasised surface and took their places in a composition of toned and
textured planes.
When the object’s total disintegration was almost reached, analytical
cubism could move only into the abstraction it had rejected and it was
papier colie which opened a road through the impasse. Coloured papers
began to be used, and this helped to bring colour back into a movement
hitherto concentrated on design, but to bring it back as an element of
design which by the advance and recession of planes furthered the
articulation of the picture. A picture made from cut-outs tended moreover
to fewer parts, larger and more defined, and so towards clarity. Above all
the cut-outs suggested a new starting-point, for the artist ceased to break
down an object into a near-abstract pattern, but arranged shapes until an
image which stood for a guitar, a bottle, etc., had emerged. Gris was the
purist of this synthetic process ; Picasso and Braque remained empirical,
always ready to ignore theory when they felt it a constraint. Yet Picasso’s
‘Three Musicians’ (1921) is probably the masterpiece of synthetic cubism.
Built of shapes which resemble cut-outs in their hard edges and abrupt
super-impositions, it achieves everything — image, space and recession — by
manipulating these coloured planes. And much earlier, at least by 1914,
cubism had established what the fauves had only adumbrated — that the
picture was a thing in itself subject to its own and not to nature’s laws.
Analytical cubism began with the object it disrupted, but the group
‘Section d’Or’ (exhibited Paris 1912) began with pictorial elements. They
subordinated appearances to a structure of mathematical proportions,
and tried to make colour scientific, as Seurat had, by subjecting it to their
numerical canons. They held colour to be the prime element and thus
might have fused the cubist and fauve streams had any of them been great
enough: as it was they inspired the ‘Orphism’ of Delaunay. His true
subject was the natural and spontaneous life of colour, and by 1913 he
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had developed a motive of concentric coloured disks into a symbol of
atmospheric luminosity which was at once dynamic and abstract. His
associate Leger, starting with the cones and cylinders which Cezanne had
sought in nature, made a similar transition to dynamic abstraction in
terms of form.
Unlike the French movements, Italian 4 Futurism’ began with a literary
and political manifesto, that of Marinetti, published in Paris in 1909:
the past should be forgotten, its museums burnt, and a future of machinery,
cities, noise, speed and war passionately embraced. A year later a group
was formed in Milan with a programme to implement this philosophy in
paint. Divisionism suggested the colours, cubism the techniques, for
expressing not particular actions but dynamism itself. Balia painted the
several stages of an action simultaneously, Boccioni drew lines of force
to depict the ‘Dynamism of a Street’; but their pictures remained anec-
dotal until they exchanged the attempt to represent a movement for its
presentation by an abstract equivalent (e.g. Boccioni’s ‘Dynamism of a
Cyclist’ (1913)).
Expressionism is associated with Germany, where the influence of the
Norwegian Munch (who had adapted Van Gogh’s passion and Gauguin’s
line to the expression of bourgeois anxiety) had been profound. In 1905
the group ‘die Briicke’ was formed at Dresden (Kirchner, Schmidt-
Rottluff, Heckel, etc.), creating an art like that of the fauves but acid in
colour and anguished in mood. From 1912 its style became more unified
and national, and, drawing inspiration from African sculpture and Gothic
wood-cuts, sacrificed structure to intensity of feeling. On the outskirts of
the group expressionism was applied by Nolde to religious art and by
Kokoschka to the portrait. Yet the greatest expressionist was perhaps the
Parisian Rouault, who from 1904 painted prostitutes and clowns, advocates
and judges, savagely and pityingly sublimating all in his images of Christ.
A fresh phase of expressionism was launched by the ‘Blaue Reiter’
group in Munich in 191 1. Unlike ‘die Briicke’ it was international both in
composition and outlook, and was unified less by style than by its use
of fauve-cubist formal discoveries for psychological ends. Franz Marc
applied the techniques of Delaunay to convey the beings of animals in
their habitat; while Kandinsky, leader and theoretician of the group, was
influenced by memories of Slav folk art and the Byzantine church murals
of his native Russia. His early landscapes had the broad colour zones
of Gauguin, but their mesmeric and disturbing colours rendered them
not so much decorative as mystical. This appeal to the inner eye increased
at the expense of the ostensible subject-matter until in 1910 the latter
disappeared. Thereafter Kandinsky used colour in abstract and informal
shapes, whose conflicts in a space rather mental than pictorial expressed
the turbulent disharmonies of the human soul. In these pictures the ab-
stract expressionism of the ’fifties had its source.
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Pre-1914 abstraction was not a movement but resulted logically from
the formal preoccupations of fauves and cubists, and emerged simul-
taneously around 19 10- 12 in several countries to demonstrate that
pictures could be made from form alone. Picasso had turned back in
1910, but Mondriaan pressed cubist analysis to its end, stylising a tree
until only verticals and horizontals remained. Yet even at this early date
abstraction was various. For Delaunay it symbolised light, for Leger an
ordering of volumes, for Boccioni movement, and in Kandinsky’s hands
it not only acquired psychological overtones but was freed from geo-
metrical as well as natural form. Thus Kandinsky reached one extreme;
the Moscow Russians reached the other. Larionov made pictures from
light and dark diagonals (‘rayonnism’) and Malevitch from squares and
triangles (‘suprematism’) and in 1917 the latter painted the ultimate in
logical purification — a white square on a white ground.
Expressionism excepted, the discovery of new formal modes had been
the object of each several art movement, but around 1913 painters called
metaphysical or fantastic found a new subject-matter in the content of
dreams. Chagall, a Russo-Parisian, through peasant colour and cubist
geometry created a dream world where memories of his Vitebsk ghetto
jostled the Eiffel Tower, calves became visible in cows’ bellies and heads
and bodies lived contentedly apart. Chirico, an Italo-Parisian, painted
classical arcades with sharp clarity and exaggerated perspective; headless
statues or the shadow of an unseen presence inhabit a piazza ended by
a clock, a factory chimney or a train behind a wall. So clarity conceals
mystery as in pictures by Rousseau; but Chirico’s magic is chilling and
forebodes catastrophe. Here painting turned away from the rational to
prepare the way for surrealism.
1905-14 was the period of invention when almost all the great dis-
coveries were made so that the between-wars would be a period of fulfil-
ment. Yet the academies were still dominant and neither the fashionable
world nor the general public understood the new art, which, whenever it
was put on exhibition, created a scandal widely thought to be its purpose.
Matters were better than they had been for the impressionists, for now an
avant-garde was recognised as normal. Impressionists and post-impres-
sionists had been first condemned then accepted : this was the new pattern.
The avant-garde, now extended from Paris to other major cities, was both
conscious of its role and confident in its future. A few bold dealers
(Kahnweiler), a few bold collectors (the American Steins and the Russian
Schukin) were persuaded, and the leading artists could make a living. In
France and Britain the museums fought a stiff rearguard action, but auda-
cious directors appeared in Germany — a first breach in the official wall.
The art of this period was related to society less by the social consciousness
of ‘die Briicke’ or the self-conscious modernity of the futurists than by
its experimental attitude. The artist in probing the nature and resources of
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painting became a research worker who paralleled rather than symbolised
the contemporary achievements of science.
Its style perfected, cubism ceased to destroy and it was Marcel Duchamp
who continued the attack. Between 19 11 and 1914 he ‘debunked’ many
accepted sanctities: love, by revealing woman as an arrangement of flues;
inspiration, by techniques of chance; machine efficiency, by his ‘Cocoa-
Grinder’; art itself by ‘ready-mades’ (mass-produced objects mounted
like sculpture). Amid the mass slaughter of 1916 his sophisticated scepti-
cism became the nihilism of Dada which demanded a romantic anarchy
for both art and society. Defeated Germany gave this philosophy a ready
welcome, and both there and in Paris the Dadaists made nonsense verse
and nonsense pictures to mock rationality, held provocative exhibitions
and childish demonstrations to shock the world into recognising its own
insanity. Yet Dada had lasting results. The collages of Ernst and Schwitters
developed for satirical what cubism had invented for formal reasons, the
‘ ready-mades ’ argued that the whole world was potential art, while Arp
pioneered a new bio-morphism by his insistence that the artist must
parallel, not imitate, nature so that his wood reliefs grew in his hands like
fruit on a tree. Finally, an understanding of Freud brought realisation that
Dada nonsense was not nonsense but symbolised subconscious desires.
At which point Dada evolved into surrealism.
The origins of surrealism were literary and its manifesto was published
in 1924 by the poet Breton. The poets sought to explore the subconscious
by automatic writing and the artists looked for equivalent techniques,
sacrificing formal considerations to the discovery and presentation of a
disturbing and irrational imagery by any helpful means, even illusionist
realism. Thus Max Ernst used ( inter alia ) collage to find and juxtapose
unrelated images and displace them from their natural setting — like a
canoe and a vacuum-cleaner making love in a forest. The effects were to
startle the spectator, to make him question the inevitable rightness of
everyday reality, and to show him poetry in the absurd. Dali’s horrific and
photographic visions advertised the cult, but its true artist-poet was the
Catalan Miro, who rejected illusionism for abstract shapes which he used
less as elements in a formal pattern than as emblems of a mythological
world. Miro transcended surrealism, and in his hieroglyphs developed a
range of expression which ran from the gay to the horrible or the
obscene, but his particular gift was to preserve the insights and spontan-
eous reactions of primitives and children in a precise, subtle and intellec-
tual art. Miro owed something to Klee, whose art also was rooted in the
subconscious, which he plumbed to the primordial depths where he believed
all things to originate. Klee sought emblems of this primitive realm which
should make visible the formative processes rather than the finished
products of nature, and his method was to begin with formal elements —
line, tone, colour — until an image suggested itself which he would con-
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sciously perfect. Though his pictures are tiny, personal, fanciful and
apparently slight, his command of structure developed from the dis-
coveries of fauves, cubists and Delaunay, and explained in his ‘Peda-
gogue’s Notebooks’, was nowhere excelled. It is by this combination of
formal organisation with psychic improvisation that he united the two
mainstreams of modem art and became one of its most significant
painters.
Against surrealist unreason and uncontrolled expressionism, there
emerged in the early post-war years an ultra-rational trend which sought
discipline in a stricter geometry. One source was the cubism of Gris, who
started with an abstract order which he progressively modified by
concrete identifications (‘out of a cylinder I make a bottle’) until a self-
sufficient intellectual structure acquired a foothold in reality. Ozenfant’s
‘Purism’ (Manifesto, Paris 1918) reversed this process, abstracting form
from jugs as Poussin from the nude. Standard shapes resulted which
might have unified this painting with industrial design had it had force
enough. Instead it was Leger who revealed and idealised technological
society. In his ‘Grande Dejeuner’ (1921) the figures are assembled from
machined forms in industrial colours among industrial products, yet
achieve a monumental and leisured serenity in their mechanised utopia.
Mondriaan went further. Rejecting images and associations he reduced
his forms to a grid and his colours to primes. His ‘Neo-Plasticism’, he
insisted, constituted in the mutual relations of these simple elements a
new and man-made reality of absolute form; it was an art of pure
contemplation whose aim was to render visible a universal harmony inde-
pendent of the natural order. Kandinsky, stimulated by the construc-
tivists, turned from his informal abstractions which had exteriorised
human emotion to free arrangements of geometric forms. At times these
were as absolute as Mondriaan’s, at others, in their interactions in cosmic
and microcosmic space, they seemed emblems of universal conflict within
a natural order fundamentally indifferent to man. All these trends were
institutionalised by the German Bauhaus which Gropius founded in 1919,
where artists were to design buildings with all their contents (murals,
light sockets, machinery, furniture) so that art should rejoin craft under
the aegis of architecture and the artist should be re-integrated in society.
The Bauhaus created modern art-training, grounding it on the study of
basic design in terms of particular materials; while its two greatest
teachers — Kandinsky and Klee, studying the elements of point, line,
plane and colour — strove to formulate the laws of form.
From 1918 until the end of our period Bonnard, Matisse and Braque
continued to develop their personal styles uninfluenced by art movements,
depressions, revolutions or wars ; Bonnard on the basis of impressionism,
Matisse of fauvism and Braque of cubism. No new principles were in-
volved, but each artist thoroughly explored the possibilities of his style
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and their pictures are among the finest of the period. Picasso was cubist,
neo-classic, surrealist and expressionist by turns, even all at once. From
1915 he began to alternate Ingres-like drawings with cubist works, and in
the early ’twenties joined the return to order by painting monumental
figures in an adaptation of Poussin. His cubism of the time makes no con-
cessions to representation but the planes are simplified and clearer. Even
before the war he had made a few paintings which in retrospect look
surrealist, but from 1927 surrealism became a major element in his art.
With the Spanish Civil War he became emotionally involved in the tragedy
of the decade. All his invention and technique now served an art of
ferocious distortion whose first monument was the huge ‘ Guernica’ (1937)
and which he continued in a long series of seated women and still lifes
until 1945.
Before 1910 only Sickert’s impressionist realism broke the sterility of
British painting, so the public were scandalised when in 1910-12 Roger
Fry staged two exhibitions of modem French art. Then Wyndham Lewis
launched ‘Vorticism’, a futurist-inspired rebellion which fell a victim to
the war and his deficiencies as a painter. Complacency was absolute in the
’twenties save for the eccentric Spencer, but in 1933 ‘Unit One’ was
formed with Read as spokesman, Axis as its magazine and Nicholson,
Hepworth and Moore among its members. All lived in Hampstead; and
when for a few years they were joined by notable refugees (Mondriaan,
Gabo, Gropius, etc.) they generated the most exciting artistic atmosphere
in Europe. Climax came in 1936 with international exhibitions of abstrac-
tion and surrealism, for a year later the ‘Euston Road Group’, moved by
unemployment and the threat of fascism to reject an art which seemed to
them irrelevant to life, led a return to impressionist realism. ‘Unit One’
dissolved but Nicholson continued geometrical abstraction, Sutherland
discovered a modern romantic landscape, and these with the sculptors
Moore and Hepworth preserved British art in its new audacity and
scale.
In the United States it was the impressionist realism of the ‘Ash Can
School’ which first attacked the academies. But artistic Americans looked
to Europe, and some were so daring that a small gallery for modem
French works — the New York ‘291’ — could establish itself by 1909. In
the vast Armory Exhibition of 1913, amidst uproar, mockery and some
enthusiasm, American and French modernism was seen by more than
100,000 people in New York alone. Some of the great modem collections
were now started, while Gallery ‘ 291 ’ began to sponsor Americans trained
in revolutionary Paris or Berlin, so that by 1917 modem art had a firm
foothold.
In the between-war years an isolationist and chauvinistic reaction took
place, both with the public and among artists who resented the collectors’
preference for Europeans. A romantic and regionalist naturalism became
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the vogue, and after the depression ‘art for art’s sake’ was consciously
replaced by social and political commitment. The early New Deal helped
artists with commissions, but two events turning on private patronage
were more important: the foundation in 1929 of the Museum of Modern
Art in New Y ork, based on the Bliss collection, and the attracting of leading
artist refugees to America. As in Hampstead an exciting artistic climate
was bom in a small and outlawed group led here by Jackson Pollock,
which, exploring a form of abstract expressionism based on new techniques
of psychic improvisation, produced the American ‘Action Painting’ so
soon to burst upon the world.
Sculpture
After the death of Michelangelo sculpture declined, for art turned to
effects of light and space which favoured painting. This phase reached a
climax with impressionism, and with its exhaustion painting returned to
object and picture plane and sculpture recovered. Its modem history is
the story of that recovery, largely through movements launched by
painters.
It began with Rodin, who in himself summed up romanticism, realism
and impressionism, but who joined his use of these to a fresh understanding
of Michelangelo, from whom he learned something purely sculptural — the
expression of movement through tactile values. Like Degas, he never
forgot inner muscular tension even while his surfaces expressed the play of
light; but unlike Degas he preserved not only the Renaissance technique
but its full heroic humanism, and this, while it added to his stature,
made him the culmination of an old rather than the primitive of a new
tradition.
Maillol led a reaction to neo-classicism, the only movement Rodin had
not absorbed. His re-working of Greek sculpture was in terms of nature,
so that his ‘Chained Action’ (1905) combines generalised and static
volumes with the animality of Courbet, but his revival of humanism kept
Maillol also within the nineteenth century.
German expressionism was in sculpture a classic heresy, so that
Lehmbruck, its most talented exponent, preserved Maillol’s clarity even
through elongated and emotive forms.
Fauve sculpture is limited to Matisse, who transposed composition
by colour into composition by plastic form. It becomes modem through a
change of emphasis, for form and medium now precede representation. A
comparison between ‘Reclining Nude’ (1907) and ‘Jeanette V’ (1911)
illustrates this by a growing readiness to exaggerate single forms for the
sake of tactile and architectonic order.
Bondage to the natural figure was broken by cubism, futurism and
Brancusi. Picasso’s ‘ Head of a Woman ’ (1909) is straight translation of his
1909 pictures into three dimensions; thereafter, though a little late,
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Lipchitz and Laurens provide a sculptural analogue for each cubist phase.
Though sculpture still takes its cue from painting it remains only slightly
behind in the destruction of tradition and the creation of new images,
and by 1922 had acquired independent validity; e.g. Lipchitz’s ‘Homme
Assis’ (Breton granite) has not only the planar structure of synthetic
cubism but the ponderous monumentality of stone.
Futurist sculptures were among the movement’s most vital creations.
Nowhere did Boccioni express his conception of space-time more success-
fully than in his ‘ Development of a Bottle in Space’ (1912) while Duchamp
Villon’s ‘The Horse’ (1914) is a potent and abstract image of mechanical
energy.
Brancusi’s organic abstraction owed nothing to painting for he sought
always for the sculptural essence, striving to express an idea through the
fewest and simplest shapes. His ‘Kiss’ (1908) conveys action with
minimum detail and minimum impairment of the block, his ‘ Mrs Meyer’
(1910) reduces portrait to four curved forms, while his ‘Bird in Space’
(1919) captures almost in a single ovoid both form and flight.
Cubist iconoclasm had spread from traditional forms to traditional
media and led Picasso through papiers colies to constructions in
space. These were still pictorial — that is, to be viewed frontally — and
it was the constructivists who developed the idea into three full dimen-
sions. Meduniezsky’s ‘Construction 1919’ is sculpture made from a
ring, a triangle and two strips of bent metal, and so anticipates Kan-
dinsky’s geometrical abstractions. It was neither carved nor modelled
but built, and indeed some constructivist assemblages suggest architect’s
models.
Dada produced sculpture almost more naturally than painting, such as
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Ready-Mades’ and the satirical constructions of
Ernst and Schwitters. If the surrealists were less witty they were more
creative, and indeed surrealist sculpture betters much surrealist painting
because it is unliterary. Thus Giacometti’s ‘Spoon Woman’ (1926)
conjures up a disturbing presence through subtle undulations rather than
by any double image, and Lipchitz’s ‘Figure 1926-30’ — two intersecting
pincers topped by an abstract head with glaring eyes — is a true nightmare.
And if Picasso’s ‘Figure 1928’, half-human and half-horse, is related to
his contemporary paintings it is because the latter are sculptural. The
fundamental vocabulary of modem sculpture was complete by 1930,
though development and exploitation continued of which only brief indi-
cations are possible here.
Picasso in two periods of sculptural activity (1928-34 and 1940-5) used
many materials and many styles. His work ranged from thin figurines
and obscene surrealist monstrosities to objets trouves and near-naturalism,
his techniques from welded iron to twisted paper. If he produced no
masterpieces his unrivalled inventiveness made his oeuvre a rich quarry
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of ideas. Matisse by contrast produced few surprises, but his series
‘ The Back ’ culminated in two works of monumental grandeur.
Naum Gabo, a pioneer of Russian constructivism, added transparent
plastics to wood and metal, which with its abstract geometry made his
work of the ’twenties look like scientific instruments or photographs of
astrophysical phenomena. Pevsner’s related constructions suggest rather
biological science: animalcula under the microscope, dissected mem-
branes or birds’ wings. The American Calder made constructions of sheet
metal more overtly animal (‘Whale’, ‘Black Beast’, etc.) but is best
known for his mobiles — Miro-like forms in coloured sheet which move
freely in the wind. More prophetic was Juan Gonzales, whose sculpture in
wrought iron and harsh angular shapes could easily belong to the ’fifties.
In the biomorphic wing the two leading figures were Jean Arp and
Henry Moore. Less exquisitely refined than Brancusi, less suggestive of
immense meanings compressed into a hieroglyph, Arp’s ‘ Human Concre-
tions ’ are shaped like stones or nesting birds and palpably breathe with
inner life. Moore, far greater in range and in powers of development, has
yet at the centre of his oeuvre one dominant conception, the reclining
figure at once woman and landscape which stands for the enduring,
regenerative and procreative forces of the earth (e.g. ‘Recumbent Figure,
Green Homton stone, 1938 ’). Moore in his work of the ’thirties not only
founded the English school of sculpture but, more than any of her painters,
brought England back into the mainstream of Western art.
Architecture
In the nineteenth century social and industrial revolution required a new
architecture. New building types such as railway stations and department
stores evolved, and in them new materials like iron and glass made possible
unsupported spans and better lighting. But only in temporary or utili-
tarian structures such as the Crystal Palace, Paddington Train Shed or
the Garabit Viaduct could these facts be admitted. Elsewhere, as at the
Albert Hall, an engineer’s structure was clothed in stone and a period
style.
Inspired by Ruskin, William Morris attacked this dishonesty, arguing
that the present age should imitate the methods and not the style of the
Middle Ages; that it should base art on craft to give it roots in society.
He devised a new ornament freshly stylised from plant forms to replace
the machine-made and tasteless decoration in which everything was
smothered. His own house (built in 1 859 by Philip Webb) replaced pomp
by domesticity, showed its bricks and structure, and was planned in terms
of function rather than of symmetry and facades. Charles Voysey con-
tinued this reticence into the 1890s. His homes too had period flavour
without period detail, but were lighter and more suburban. Contemporary
were the Garden City (city in the country) experiments which made a first
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attack on the squalor of industrial housing. But the whole Art and Craft
movement was flawed by Morris’s rejection of the machine which was
becoming the central fact of civilisation, so that after 1900 it lost relevance.
Machine-age architecture began in Chicago, where Louis Sullivan in-
vented a form for the high office block. His ‘Guaranty Building’ (1895)
is free of historical reminiscence, and expresses both its function (shops
underneath, offices above) and its structural steel cage.
About the same time an attempt to escape historicism was made in
Europe with the creation of ‘Art Nouveau’. This was a decorative style
of free-flowing curves owing much to Morris, but wilder, more exotic and
anti-rational. Through its general application to objects, furniture, china,
jewellery, book-plates, it unified an interior ensemble; but it could also
be truly architectural. Thus Horta’s ‘Maison du Peuple’ (Brussels, 1896-9)
by using iron and glass effected a light spatial transparency; while the
undulations which pervaded not only the structure of its auditorium but
its facade and its plan took away all sense of the utilitarian. In Barcelona
Gaudi was still more extreme, building a stone palace of swaying forms
like sea-hollowed caves (Casa Mila, 1905-10), an architecture plastic and
untrammelled as sculpture.
Most hopeful of these movements was that in Chicago, where Sullivan
had cleared the way for the expression of the industrial city; but in 1893
the Chicago World Fair launched a fresh phase of neo-classicism which
swept through America and Europe to remain largely dominant until
1945. The growth of the New York skyscraper belongs therefore to the
history of engineering.
Sullivan’s great pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, made his chief contribution
before 1914 in the field of the suburban villa, for his skyscraper projects
remained unbuilt. This was a paradox, for social and technical change
did not become marked in the domestic field until after 1920, with the
motor-car, the servant shortage and the gradual mechanisation of
services. Wright’s ‘Robie House’ (Chicago, 1909) shows its modernity in
sweeping horizontals, expressive of machine-cut efficiency, and purposive
movement across the plane, while its spreading cantilevers (roofs over
verandahs) begin to blend interior and exterior space. Asymmetrical and
irregular massing disrupts the traditional box shapes which are cut by
intersecting planes like those of contemporary cubism. The inside looks
backward to the countryman’s cottage; it is dark, a refuge, where little
diamond panes make even glass a barrier; but the shifting room heights,
and the planning which forces space into a continuum through wide
openings from a central hearth, are as disruptive of the room box and as
cubist as the outside. Inside and out, brick, stone and wood show where
possible the natural surfaces. Wright’s one monumental industrial work,
the ‘Larkin Office Block’ (Buffalo, 1904), is also natural brick. A stark
cube with blank double towers at the comers, it turns its back on the
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city and looks inwards into its own glazed hall whose secure space flows
easily into galleries.
As Art Nouveau declined into commercial extravagance, a Scotsman,
Mackintosh, like Wright sought a new monumentality. His ‘ Glasgow Art
School’ (1898-1909) adumbrates the two main lines on which modem
architecture was to develop, the subjective or expressionist and the
objective or rational. Its front windows are grids and rational; but its
entrance, and the library with its tall forms rising from the hillside, are
expressionist. The library interior is different again; its spatial interplay of
post and beam, half decorative, half structural, anticipates de Stijl.
Clear separation between the main tendencies begins in Vienna, where
Mackintosh was greatly admired; Olbrich’s ‘Hochzeitsturm’ (Darmstadt,
1907) is expressionist, Wagner’s ‘ Post Office Savings Bank’ (Vienna, 1905)
is rational. Where the ‘Hochzeitsturm’ is brilliantly inventive — five-
fingered tower, roofs in cubic geometry, window bands that cut round
comers — the interior of the post office is classically simple. Horta had
used iron and glass as instruments of whimsy; with Wagner they express
the smooth efficiency of the machine. Finally with Loos’s ‘ Ornament and
Crime’ (1908) Vienna gave rationalism a fighting dogma. Loos’s ‘Steiner
House’ (Vienna, 1910) showed in practice how architecture might be
returned to its basic elements, undecorated stereometric volumes.
But it was in Germany that modem architecture matured, in both its
aspects. Hermann Muthesius, who had studied English Art and Craft,
founded the ‘Deutsche Werkbund’ in 1907 with similar aims save for one
difference — the artist-craftsman was to make, not the individual and
therefore expensive object, but the prototype for machine reproduction.
Art and craft were reoriented towards industry and a mass society.
In the same year Peter Behrens was appointed chief designer to the
electrical combine A.E.G., to shape their products, their literature and
their buildings. In his ‘Turbine Factory’ (Berlin, 1909) he strove to
discover a form for such buildings and achieved a masterpiece, but one
which was classical and expressionist, rational and irrational at once. To
carry the massive and oversailing roof the stanchions appear like columns
strengthened at the comers by giant stones, which results in a Greek
temple converted to the expression of industrial power. Yet the factory is
rational in that the stanchions reveal their steelness and are linked only
by glass; it is irrational in that they are really arches flowing without
break from base to crown, while the ponderous comers are thin concrete
and carry nothing.
The masters of contemporary architecture — Gropius, Mies van der
Rohe and le Corbusier — all worked in Behrens’s studio, so that when a
lavishly illustrated book on Frank Lloyd Wright was published in
Germany the chief sources of the first modem (so-called ‘international’)
style came momentarily together. Results were immediate, for the work-
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shop of Gropius’s ‘Fagus Factory’ (1911-13) is the first entirely modem
building. It continues the work of Behrens, is still a temple, but its shape
is the crystal cube typical of the international style a generation later.
Romantic monumentality has gone; in its place is the translucent recti-
linear elegance of a glass sheath which, hanging proud of its piers, is
visibly unstrengthened at the comers. Where Behrens was personal and
glorified the roar of dynamos, Gropius was objective to symbolise the
quietly efficient and anonymous corporation.
At the Werkbund Exhibition (Cologne, 1914) Gropius took up Behrens’s
theme. His ‘Machine Shed’ is a temple without columns whose stretched
and moulded skin expresses only its function — the enclosure of industrial
space. In the office block of this model factory he invented another motive
for the international style — the cylindrical glass tower which houses and
reveals a spiral staircase. Yet Gropius’s planning is not modem. Both
factories were composed by elements, i.e. of separate buildings. In
the Fagus Factory grouping was by function merely; in the Model
Factory (where there was no function) it was axial and symmetrical, i.e.
academic.
If Gropius led the rational-classic wing of German architecture, Poelzig,
Berg and Taut constituted its so-called expressionist, which, if less pure,
is more dramatic and formally inventive. Poelzig’s ‘ Water Tower’ (Posen,
191 1) sums this up. Its enormous cylindrical volumes intend an aggressive
impact, but they spring from its functions as tank and exhibition gallery.
His ‘Chemical Factory’ (Luban, 191 1) is freely planned after the English
manner, while Taut for his ‘Glass Pavilion’ (Cologne, 1914) invented the
lattice or geodesic dome.
French contribution to modem architecture lay in the development of
reinforced concrete. Among the first large buildings in this material was
the ‘Tourcoing Spinning Mill’ (1895) where Francois Hennebique re-
placed walls by a light concrete grid with glass infilling. His aims were
practical — to resist fire and increase light ; and he was so successful that
both material and method spread rapidly for utilitarian building.
But it was Auguste Perret who turned a practice into an aesthetic. In his
‘25 bis Rue Franklin’ (Paris, 1903) he supported a high block of flats
with six cantilevered stories on posts of unimaginable thinness. Though he
used decorated tiles, frame and cantilever were visibly the basis of the
fa£ade; so that here Perret brought concrete within the classic principles of
trabeation by adapting them to proportions based on weightlessness and
the preponderance of voids. His methods were apparently true to his
materials, but they were not so in fact, for ferro-concrete is naturally
monolithic and performs best in arcuate forms. Hennebique showed this
in his spiral staircases for the ‘Petit Palais’ (Paris, 1898) and his ideas
were taken up by engineers. Thus Maillart constructed bridges from curved
concrete slabs (Tavanasa Bridge, Grisons, 1905) while Freyssinnet’s huge
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airship hangars with their parabolic arches (Orly, 1916-24) equal in
achievement the great Victorian train sheds. But the only architect to work
on these lines was Max Berg, a German individualist whose ‘ Centenary
Hall’ (Breslau, 19 10-13) is a modem version of the Pantheon, where
curving girders and openwork dome anticipate Nervi.
There remain two prophets — the Frenchman Gamier and the Italian
Sant’ Elia. Garnier’s ‘Cite Industrielle’ (1901-4, published 1917) is a
detailed blueprint which shows not only house blocks with white facades,
terraces and roof-gardens, but studies their setting and the separation
of city functions — work, residence, leisure and transport. The futurist
Sant’ Elia in his ‘Projects 1914’ gave romantic glimpses of a skyscraper
city with multi-level circulation, which provided an emotional charge to
inspire necessary rethinking of a whole way of life.
Actual town-planning was most advanced in Holland, where Berlage’s
‘South Amsterdam’ (begun 1915) was based on the broad street and
residential block; which if less adventurous than the plans of the vision-
aries was both more essentially civic and more suited to the facts of
population than the garden city.
1919-23, the aftermath of war, was a period of uncertainty, protest
and adventure which favoured expressionism; and, because the coming
leaders, little employed on building, turned to imaginative projects, it was
a heyday of ideas.
As a neutral, Holland was the first to build; but the expressionism of
the Amsterdam School (Eigen Haard Estate, 1917-21) was whimsical, a
late product of the secure world of art nouveau. True expressionism was
German, declamatory yet also functional. Even Mendelsohn’s ‘Einstein
Tower ’ (Potsdam, 1921), which surprisingly calls to mind a submarine, has
an odd logic, for it is the ‘periscope’ of a basement observatory; and
while its streamlining is irrational its moulded forms derive from the
plastic nature of concrete, though for lack of the necessary skilled labour
it was actually built in rendered brick. Hoger’s ‘Chilehaus’ (Hamburg,
1922) was just as practical and as metaphorical, exploiting a corner site to
suggest a high prow and tiered decks curling away in waves. But some
works have been called ‘expressionist’ that are not rhetorical. Their
architects denied that certain functions meant certain forms, restudied
function and were thereby prompted to invent new form, e.g. Haring’s
‘Cowhouse’ (Garkau, 1923).
The Dutch group ‘de Stijl ’ (founded 1917) made a reappraisal of form
itself, going back like Loos in 1910 to its elements. But where Loos had
seen architecture as a simple aggregation of closed volumes (especially the
box) de Stijl, taking one hint from Wright and another from cubism,
either broke open the box to compose in planes, or caused the boxes
themselves so to intersect and interrelate as to destroy their separateness in
a new continuum. Such buildings could no longer be grasped from a single
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viewpoint; they must be appreciated in space-time by walking round and
by walking through. Both methods are combined in Van Doesburg’s
‘Project for a Private House’ (1923).
In the same period, Werkbund ideas for the union of art and craft and
their realignment with architecture and industry culminated in the
foundation of the Bauhaus under Gropius (Weimar, 1919). Although both
expressionism and de Stijl were influential, it was a variety of functionalism
(akin to Haring’s) which came to predominate. Here the artist founded his
inspiration on a reassessment of function in terms of materials and
machine production, so that by 1930 a contemporary style of furniture,
fitments and typography had been created.
Its approach to architecture can be illustrated by Mies’s unbuilt projects.
The 1919 skyscraper owes its queer fortress shape not to expressionism
but to the aesthetics of the glass wall; it was composed for reflections
instead of shadows. The brick villa of 1923 explores de Stijl, and the
linking of inner and outer space by walls continued from within. The
office block of a year earlier is structural-functional; its long concrete
horizontals alternating with bands of glass were to have a vast commercial
progeny after 1930.
It was Gropius, however, who led the return to order in Germany.
Already in 1922 his project for the Chicago Tribune employed the struc-
tural prose of the original Chicago school; but his opportunity came when
the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, for its new building (1925-6) was the
first of these large projects to become reality. The workshop block
developed the rectangular shape and glass curtain of the Fagus Works,
but now the piers are hidden and the basement set back so that it floats on
air. Each wing is an element — workshop, design school, hostel, admini-
stration — and each receives its own functional expression. But the elements
are welded into sculptural unity via the legacy of de Stijl ; spatial volumes,
each having its own identity, flow freely into others in a composition
where every change of viewpoint brings new revelations of form.
Holland produced a contemporary rationalism in the flats of J. P. Oud
(The Hook, 1924-7), but still more significant was the work of le Cor-
busier, who in Paris was occupied with his ‘Citrohan’ projects: a concep-
tion of the house which converted Sant’ Elia’s visions into a precise and
revolutionary plan. The house was to be a ‘machine for living in’ on the
analogy of a car. It was to consist of a simple cube, manufactured from
standard parts, supported on posts so that walls could be glazed and
partitions moved, finished for easy maintenance and equipped instead of
furnished — even the garden would be built-in. These cubes would be
assembled into blocks, self-contained with their own local shops and
garages, and standing in spacious grounds made possible because their
concentration would release land. Accessible but well away, multi-level
highways would carry their inhabitants to tall slabs in the city centre
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which would hold factory, office and store. His ‘Pavilion de l’Esprit
Nouveau’ (Paris Exhibition, 1925) was the prototype for such a house.
The new ideas spread rapidly so that the exhibition at Weissenhof in
1927, with flats by Mies, Gropius, Oud, Corbusier and others, revealed
that a new style had emerged. This, the ‘International Style’, was rect-
angular and white, it had black roofs carrying terrace gardens, flat fagades
with balconies, and windows that were punched holes or unbroken bands.
It abhorred decoration, relying for its aesthetics on bare geometry and
good proportions which, it claimed, arose naturally from new functions
and materials. In fact they were a free choice to symbolise machine
efficiency, for neither concrete nor modem living enforced square forms.
If the freedom of the expressionist period was now lost, the new
stylistic restrictions were creative. Mies’s ‘Barcelona Pavilion’ (1929)
shows some of its spatial possibilities. Here, above its stylobate, rich
marbles contrast with white, glass with reflecting pools and bright steel;
while opaque, translucent and transparent walls lead a space defined only
by floor and roof in a slow rhythm, newly classical in its serenity, which
makes no distinction between within and without. By contrast, le Cor-
busier’s ‘Villa Savoie’ (Poissy, 1928-30), its lower floor withdrawn, poises,
a closed cube on thin stalks. Inside is another geometry, for ramps,
terraces and partitions which might be curved or of glass create a spatial
continuum subtle and complex as that of Mies.
In the competition for a League of Nations Palace (Geneva, 1927)
Corbusier applied on a larger scale the lessons of the Bauhaus, expressing
separate functions in separate wings yet joining all in a free sculptural
unity which respected the site. His wedge-shaped auditorium, with its
roof slung to give unhindered vision and parabolic to perfect the acoustics,
created a new type. Though he lost the commission to the conservatives,
officials and governments had been forced to study his plans and to
realise that modern architecture answered real problems. The failure of the
building actually erected— it ignored function and wrecked the site —
made this the last major victory for traditionalism, and at last Corbusier
received a few large commissions. The modernists, infuriated by defeat,
formed C.I.A.M. (Congres International d’ Architecture Moderne), an
organisation which did much to publicise, much to unify and something
to narrow the international style.
The ’twenties created a style; the ’thirties diffused and diversified it.
They began disastrously with the great slump and the rise of dictatorships
which ended modern architecture in Russia and Germany during this
time. But the refugees from Nazism spread their ideas, and, while the
movement itself became aggressively doctrinal to combat hostility, this
did not inhibit its leaders, who, coming together until the Weissenhof
Exhibition, now increasingly diverged.
Corbusier’s rejected plans for a Palace of the Soviets (1931) exemplified
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the fertility of his invention. There was to be a vast auditorium whose
roof should hang from splaying girders resting at one end on posts and
suspended at the other from a gigantic parabolic arch, and displayed as
confidently as the buttressing of a gothic apse. His ‘Swiss Pavilion’ |
(Paris, 1932) was quite differently uncompromising. It was a square slab
daringly cantilevered from massive legs, yet its staircase tower curved;
gracefully, while the attached communal rooms at ground level ended in a
wall of irregular stone, a resounding denial of machine aesthetic. For a
much larger slab (the Ministry of Education at Rio, 1936-45) he was only
consultant, but here he conceived the prototype for innumerable post-war
skyscrapers. In the brise-soleil, a concrete grid covering its southern flank,
he invented not only a necessary corrective to the glass curtain for hot
countries, but a new stylistic feature big with sculptural and decorative
potential. The execution of this building by the Brazilians Costa and
Niemeyer began the flourishing modem school of Latin America.
Little had occurred in England since 1 900, but there were signs of reviving
energies when Owen Williams erected a modern factory for Boots Ltd
(Beeston, 1930-2). The arrival of refugees gave a fresh impetus. Gropius
joined with Fry to design Impington College (Cambridgeshire, 1 933), a freely
planned school which was the beginning of British primacy in this sphere,
while Lubetkin inspired two other modem buildings — ‘Highpoint Flats’
(Highgate, 1933) and ‘Finsbury Health Centre’ (London, 1938).
Architecture in America was historicist or commercial; even Wright’s
‘Californian Houses’ were inspired by Mayan temples, and were brilliant
rather than modem. The ‘Rockefeller Centre’ (New York, 1931-40)
marked an advance, for though expressionist it was planned as a group.
But Europeans brought the real change. The Swiss Lescaze shaped the first
skyscraper in the international style (the Saving Fund Society Building,
Philadelphia, 1932), unique in America for twenty years, while the
Viennese Neutra brought the same style to the domestic house (Lovell
House, Los Angeles, 1927-9).
The exhibition of European achievement by the Museum of Modem
Art in New York in 1932 made a great impact, not least on Wright whom it
inspired to a second creative phase. His ‘Usonian’ houses were an adapta-
tion of his earlier style to simplicity, standardisation and low-cost
production; while his ‘Falling Water’ (Bear Run, 1936) magnificently
combined bold international-style cantilevers in white concrete with a
rough stone tower in exquisite harmony with its natural setting.
These achievements were consolidated by the arrival of Gropius and
Mies. Gropius at Harvard was the greatest teacher of the new generation;
while Mies, commissioned to design the campus of the Illinois Institute of
Technology, was through his buildings the greatest influence on their
style. His plan for the campus (1940) continues the flowing classicism of his
Barcelona Pavilion; while the buildings themselves, square boxes of bricks,
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steel and glass, return to that surprising blend of industrialism with the
Greek temple practised by Behrens, but with the expressionism left out.
A style of tasteful compromise characterised Scandinavia of which the
masterpiece was ‘Stockholm Town Hall’ (1909-23); but in 1930 Gunnar
Asplund burst into full modernity with the light elegance of his ‘ Swedish
Pavilion’ (Stockholm Exhibition, 1930). ‘Bella Vista Flats’ (1933) marked
the appearance of Arne Jacobsen in Denmark, but it was Finland who
in Alvar Aalto produced a new master. In his ‘ Vipuri Library ’ (1927-35) he
made the ceiling of the lecture theatre undulate to satisfy the requirements of
acoustics, and thereby demonstrated even more forcibly than Corbusier how
curving forms could be rational ; while his ‘Villa Mairea’ by using curves
and natural materials harmonised a modem villa with the countryside.
Mussolini’s dictatorship, though hampering, was not fatal to modem
architecture in Italy. Terragni’s ‘Casa del Popolo’ (Como, 1932-6) is the
perfect graft of the international grid on to the Renaissance palace.
Engineers were even freer, and among them Nervi was a true architect. His
‘ Florence Stadium ’ (1930-2) has a cantilevered roof which is poised appar-
ently on air ; a feat even exceeded by the Spaniard Torroja, whose ‘ Madrid
Grandstand ’(1935) uses light curving slabs like corrugated iron to the same
end. Maillart in his pavilion at the Zurich Exhibition in 1939 (which rises
like a sheet of bent paper at architectural scale) demonstrated just as dram-
atically the constructional if not the aesthetic possibilities of shell concrete.
These engineers, together with Freyssinnet, revealed how unnecessarily
restrictive were the post and beam methods of the international style.
Architects are dependent upon expensive patronage which is given
inadequately and late, so an epilogue is needed to reveal contemporary
masters at their full stretch. Corbusier’s ‘Unite d’Habitation’ (Marseilles,
1947-52), an assemblage of ‘Citrohan’ units, realises one of the self-
contained blocks in his imagined cities. But its stumpy legs, fire escape,
the variegated brise-soleil, above all the abstract roof garden, are power-
fully sculpturesque, while the concrete is both exposed and roughened; all
of these aggregate to a total rupture with the weightlessness and machine
polish of his earlier style. In his chapel at Ronchamp (1950-5) he
abandons even square forms, and his architectural sculpture becomes as
free and irrational as that of Gaudi. At Chandigarh (Punjab, 1954-65) he
planned a city, but the emphasis was no longer sociological but on
individual great buildings and their mutual relations. Similarly Mies in his
* Crown Hall ’ of 1952 on the Illinois campus develops his industrial temple
to its ultimate perfection as an enormous and undivided room; and in his
‘Seagram Building’ (New York, 1958) applied the precision of the Par-
thenon architects to the glass slab. Nervi has redeemed the promise of
Berg, and Candela that of Torroja, so that the international begins to take
its place among traditional styles, though its fundamentals of function,
material and structure are as valid as ever.
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DIPLOMATIC HISTORY 1930-1939
B y the end of 1930 the precarious international order established at
Versailles had begun to totter and crumble. In western Europe, the
German Foreign Minister Stresemann’s successors were being
driven by unemployment and the rocketing growth of the Nazi party to
abandon his policy of gradual revision of Versailles for a policy of
adventurism from weakness. In south-east Europe and the Mediterranean,
Franco-Italian amity was breaking on France’s refusal to consider the
Italian position on disarmament and in the Balkans. In eastern Europe,
the Soviet drive for collectivisation had weakened the vital link with
Germany without providing the Soviets with any alternative way out of
their isolation. And in the Pacific, by the terms of the London Naval
treaty of 1930, Britain and the United States had driven the extreme
Japanese nationalists in the army and elsewhere to plot external adventure
against China in Manchuria and internal revolution as the only alternatives
to what they saw as national humiliation.
These largely political issues were linked and made more extreme by the
steady spread of the economic crisis. Europe’s recovery after the war and
the disastrous German inflation of 1923 rested on a precarious but little-
understood system of international trade which, being rigidly anchored
to gold, had inadequate reserves of liquidity and was burdened with the
extra task of handling the immense transfers of funds involved in the
payment of reparations by Germany to the victors and of war-debts by
the victor countries to the United States. A major part of the extra
liquidity necessary to cover this had been provided by a high volume of
short-term loans at high interest rates, mainly from the United States.
Some of this capital had already begun to be repatriated for investment in
the great slock market boom in the United States as early as the end of
1928. The great crash of September 1929 had caused the recall of much
more. There remained a very large volume of ‘hot money’, which, as
depression spread in the United States, itself began more and more to seek
refuge in France, providing that country with reserves of confidence and
financial strength which it did not hesitate to turn to political advantage
during the economic crisis of 193 1-2.
Germany and Austria were particularly hard hit by the financial crisis
(ch. xvi). In Germany, opposition to the Young plan for the settlement of
Germany’s reparation obligations united industry and finance with extreme
nationalism and rocketed the Nazi vote in the Reichstag elections of
September 1930 to 107 seats, second only to the Social Democrats.
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Failing to obtain a revision of the Young plan from Britain, France and
the United States in negotiations in November-December 1930, the
German government turned, in search of a diplomatic victory, to the idea
of a customs union with Austria. Driven by their own economic weakness
the Austrians agreed. A preliminary protocol was signed in Vienna in
March 1931.
To world opinion this seemed a preliminary to that union of Germany
and Austria which had been forbidden by the peace treaties. At a time
when only immediate international aid could have prevented the collapse
of Austria’s largest bank, the Vienna Creditanstalt, the financial weakness
of both signatories made the realisation of their plans both impossible
and irrelevant to their position. As large-scale withdrawals of funds from
Germany and Austria continued, Britain stepped into the breach with
heavy loans to both countries. Anxiety as to the fate of the remaining
American funds drove President Hoover of the United States in June
1931 to propose a year’s moratorium on all war-debts and reparations
payments. French desire to use Germany’s weakness to force her to
abandon the customs union, end her pressure for revising the Treaty of
Versailles, and break her links with the Soviet Union, held up the imple-
mentation of the Hoover proposal for a vital three weeks.
During this period the run on Germany’s banks spread from foreign to
domestic credits. The German government sought help from both Paris
and London; but France’s demands were impossible for Germany to
accept in the state of German domestic opinion. And, from the middle of
July, the pound began to come under the same severe pressure as the
Reichsmark, at a time when the Hoover moratorium prevented Britain
recovering the large sums loaned to Germany, Austria and Hungary.
On 24 August the Labour government in Britain split bitterly on the
measures of domestic economy necessary to bolster the pound. The
new National government abandoned the gold standard entirely in
mid-September, announcing measures of economy which led to a mutiny
in the British fleet. Deserted by Britain, the German government made
a virtue of necessity and abandoned the Customs Union project on
3 September 1931, concluding that only a wide-ranging political under-
standing with France could secure a revision of reparations. For the
moment France’s policy had triumphed and the initiative lay entirely in
her hands. But it was not to survive the spread of the financial crisis to
France while Britain’s financial position recovered. French strength was
an illusion and the French use of it made her no friends for the period of
weakness that followed.
The financial crisis in Britain coincided with the total breakdown of
international order in the Far East. This order rested essentially on
Japanese goodwill towards China and her Anglo-American sponsors. For,
although the Nine Power Treaty of Washington had in 1922 bound its
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signatories to respect the political and territorial integrity of China, the
Five Power Naval Disarmament Treaty, signed at the same conference,
had, by fixing the battleship strength of America and Britain in a 5 : 5 : 3
ratio with Japan and prohibiting any fortified bases between Hawaii,
Singapore and Japan, deprived the Anglo-Saxon powers of the naval
power to intervene against Japanese aggression. The ‘ incident ’ in Mukden,
the capital of Southern Manchuria, on the night of 19 September 1931,
which led the Japanese forces in that province, ostensibly there to protect
the South Manchuria Railway, to occupy all of Manchuria and proclaim it
an independent state under the name of Manchukuo, was organised, in
fact, by a small group of influentially placed Japanese officers. But they
were reacting against a combination of Chinese nationalist pressure
designed to drive the Japanese from Manchuria, Anglo-American diplo-
matic pressure which had imposed at London in March 1930 a second
naval disarmament treaty on Japan which they regarded as nationally
humiliating, and a growth in civilian power in Japan which they believed
to be undoing the independent status of the armed forces under the
Japanese constitution (ch. xn). Their action caused the Japanese Cabinet
to resign, after it had failed to control them. And the diplomatic pressure
which was organised in Washington and at the League of Nations against
Japan would probably have failed on this inability of the Japanese
Cabinet to control the Kwantung Army, even if lack of force and
divided counsels had not rendered it even more ineffective.
This was amply demonstrated when, on 28 January 1932, the Japanese
Navy answered a Chinese boycott of Japanese goods by an amphibious
operation against Shanghai. The League of Nations had reacted to the
Manchurian incident by dispatching an investigatory commission under
Lord Lytton, a former viceroy of India. American impatience with
Japanese action led Secretary Stimson of the United States on 7 January
1932 to announce the Stimson doctrine of non-recognition of changes of
regime brought about by force. But, while the British government began
to work for League acceptance of this doctrine, the Shanghai incident led
to a misunderstanding between the two countries which was to inhibit
their co-operation in the Far East for several years. His knowledge of
American impotence and President Hoover’s resistance to any involve-
ment led Stimson, in a letter to Senator Borah, the Chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, to threaten abrogation of the Four and
Five Power Treaties. A sense of defencelessness and a fear that public
gestures would strengthen rather than defeat extremism in Japan led the
British to prefer to work for an armistice in Shanghai and Japanese
withdrawal. But they achieved this, on 3 April 1932, only at the cost of a
total loss of American confidence in British guts and goodwill.
Neither American condemnation nor the carefully conciliatory pro-
posals for a settlement advanced by the Lytton report in October 1932
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could restrain the Japanese. Though British action at the League Assembly
meeting in December 1932 prevented the smaller members from provoking
a direct clash with Japan in which Britain’s armed forces, crippled by ten
years of financial stringency and the effects of the financial crisis of 1931,
would have had to bear the brunt, the Japanese rejected all attempts at
mediation by the League of Nations and on 24 January 1933 announced
their withdrawal from the League.
The collapse of the projected German-Austrian Customs Union left
France with the momentary leadership in central Europe. The French
chose to use it not to achieve a reconciliation with Germany but to build
up still further the barriers against any revision of the Treaty of Ver-
sailles. For the Danube basin the government of M. Tardieu launched, on
5 March 1932, a plan for a free trade area to unite Austria, Czechoslo-
vakia, Hungary, Rumania and Jugoslavia, with a reconstruction loan
from France, Britain, Germany and Italy to back it. Since France, with her
offer of ten million pounds sterling, would have provided the bulk of the
financial backing, the other three powers combined to thwart the scheme
at a conference in London in April 1932. But its effect on Italy, already
disturbed by France’s persistent refusal to accept her claims for parity in
naval armaments, was to destroy entirely the French alignment of Mus-
solini’s foreign policy. In April Mussolini dismissed his Foreign Minister,
Count Grand!, to the ambassadorship in London and took over the
Foreign Ministry himself. Italian policy turned towards Germany on the
disarmament issue; while in central Europe Mussolini exerted himself to
capture control of Austria by subsidising the paramilitary nationalist
Heimwehr organisation and supported Hungary against the Little
Entente.
France was equally unsuccessful in dealing with the Soviet Union. At
the height of the crisis over the Austro-German Customs Union, in
August 1931, relations had improved so much as to allow the initialling
of the draft of a Franco-Soviet non-aggression pact. But the French
insistence on Soviet settlement with her western neighbours broke down on
Rumanian obstinacy. And the Soviet authorities whose overriding aim at
the moment was to preserve tranquillity on their western frontiers resented
French pressure as offering them little to offset a deterioration of their
relations with Germany. The prospect of a united Europe under French
hegemony at the same time aroused their deep-rooted ideological fears
that the capitalist world would seek a way out of the contradictions which,
in their view, had created the world slump, in a crusade against the Soviet
Union.
These fears were intensified by the French disarmament plan, ad-
vanced on 5 February 1932 at the opening of the World Disarmament
Conference in Geneva. The Conference itself had been in gestation since
the middle 1920s. But the annual sessions of its preparatory commission
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had produced only a draft convention on which none of its members were
agreed. The new French plan demanded compulsory arbitration backed
by an international police force as a preliminary to disarmament. As such
it denied the German claim to equality of rights, now seen in Berlin as the
only hope of the Bruning cabinet’s survival against the rising tide of
Nazism ; faced the Soviets with the chimera of a capitalist crusade ; and con-
fronted British determination not to accept any further commitments. To
the United States government it appeared to be a device to throw responsi-
bility for the breakdown of the Conference on the known unwillingness of
the United States to co-operate formally with League action against an
aggressor.
While the Conference argued, the French position was steadily eroded
as devaluation in Britain brought financial stability to London and
drained ‘hot money’ away from Paris. The British delegation exerted
themselves behind the scenes to bring Germany and France together; only
to see this in turn torpedoed by President Hoover, driven by the exigencies
of the forthcoming presidential election to make, in June 1932, an appeal
for an all-round cut of one-third in treaty strengths. For the United
States this only applied to ships which Congress were already unwilling to
authorise. For Britain it meant reduction in forces already below the level
deemed appropriate to defend her national security. For the Disarmament
Conference as a whole it offered a welcome way out of the impasse which
had developed between France and Germany.
This impasse, as it happened, had been played out less at Geneva than
at the Conference which met in mid- June at Lausanne to attempt to solve
the problem of German reparation payments after the expiry of the
Hoover moratorium. Briining’s government had finally fallen at the end
of May 1932. Bruning’s successor, Franz von Papen, attempted to solve all
Germany’s difficulties at one stroke by the offer of a Customs Union, a
consultative pact and military staff arrangements in return for French
agreement to cancellation of reparations and equality of rights for
Germany’s armaments. But the scheme was too revolutionary to inspire
overmuch French confidence in its offerer ; and M. Herriot, the new French
Premier, preferred the British offer of a consultative agreement with a
secret proviso designed to preserve a common front against Germany.
Von Papen made a further approach, with equal lack of success, to the
French in August 1932. Thereafter, rebuffed, he retreated into an ultra-
nationalist stance, expressed in September 1932 by withdrawal from the
Disarmament Conference until the German claims for equality of rights
were acknowledged. At that moment such withdrawal was of symbolic
significance only, as the general Conference had seized on the disruption
introduced by President Hoover’s intervention as an excuse to adjourn
while confidential negotiations sought to restore some hope of an agreed
outcome to its deliberations. The effects of von Papen’s offer did not,
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however, end there. In eastern Europe, both Poland and the Soviet
Union, feeling threatened by a Franco-German rapprochement, concluded
a non-aggression pact on 25 July 1932. And Poland’s example was to be
followed by France herself, alarmed by von Papen’s recoil into national-
ism and by renewed British pressure to find a basis for Germany’s return
to the Disarmament Conference. On 29 November 1932 the Franco-
Soviet non-aggression pact was signed in Paris. Its conclusion nerved the
French to agree on 11 December 1932 to a Five Power declaration on
German equality of rights ‘in a system which would provide security for
all nations’ which made it possible for Germany to return to the Dis-
armament Conference. The concession came too late, however, to preserve
Germany from Nazism. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler, the Nazi
Fuhrer, was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
While the embodiment of revanche was climbing to power in Germany,
the United States was turning away from Europe. The presidential
election of November 1932 had returned to power a Democratic President
and a Congress dominated by hostility to the notions of international
financial co-operation, determined to solve America’s economic and
financial problems in isolation, and ambivalent in its attitudes towards
European problems and the League of Nations. President Roosevelt
refused to collaborate in any way with the outgoing Republican admini-
stration during the five months between his election and his inauguration
at the end of March 1933. The crisis over European war-debt payments to
the United States, which arose with the expiry of the Hoover moratorium
on 15 December 1932, found the United States government unable to take
any initiative. Britain paid her instalment with a warning that without
some adjustments she anticipated a general breakdown. France defaulted;
and American opinion turned more against Europe.
Worse, however, was to follow. Despite vaguely encouraging noises
made by the new President to visiting statesmen (Prime Ministers
MacDonald of Britain, Herriot of France, Reichsbank President Schacht
of Germany), Roosevelt was to set himself against any measures of inter-
national financial stabilisation and to neglect his Secretary of State’s
plans for reducing the barriers to world trade. On 20 April 1933 he freed
the dollar from the gold standard. And, when the World Economic
Conference met in London in June 1933 to attempt to work out some
measure of international financial co-operation to put an end to the panic
movements of international capital which had fragmented the world’s
financial system into three great blocs, dollar, sterling and gold, and was
shortly to drive Germany into total financial isolation in a permanent
siege economy, Roosevelt chose publicly to denounce the only positive
proposal to emerge from the conference in terms which made it clear that
he placed domestic economic recovery above international recovery.
The collapse of the World Economic Conference was followed by
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increasing default on their war-debts by America’s other creditors. The
predominantly isolationist Congress retaliated in 1934 with the Johnson
Act, which denied access to the American capital market to any foreign
government in default on its war-debts. At the same time, American
opinion turned more and more against Europe, reinterpreting history to
make America’s entry into the first world war the product of British
propaganda and the machinations of American armaments and war-loans
dealers, fearful of losing their investment through an Allied defeat. By
1935 the Senate had imposed on a reluctant President neutrality legislation,
making it mandatory on him, in the event of an international conflict in
which America was neutral, to ban the export of arms to any belligerent,
whether aggressor or victim. Those powers in Europe pledged by the
League Covenant to protect the international status quo against aggres-
sion, if necessary by military sanctions, were at one stroke debarred from
access to the industries of America.
While the government and people of the United States were thus with-
drawing from the reserve benches to the grandstands of the international
arena, the new German Chancellor was planning a progressive unilateral
dismantlement of the Peace Settlement as a preparation to launching
Germany on a course of world conquest. In Mein Kampf written nine
years earlier in the aftermath of the French invasion of the Ruhr, he had
advocated the exploitation of British and Italian fears of France. He was
now to use these same countries as his tools against the Peace Settlement.
Ordering the creation of an air force and the expansion of Germany’s
army and navy to make Germany a major military power by 1938, he
began by focusing his foreign policy on a rapprochement with Poland and
the union of his native Austria with his adopted Germany (ch. xvi).
But for their alarm over his Austrian policy, where he both under-
estimated the strength and determination of the Christian Social Chan-
cellor, Engelbert Dolfuss, and proved unable to control the Austrian Nazis,
the powers did not react very strongly at first to Hitler’s advent to power.
They were engaged principally in attempting to take the Disarmament
Conference one stage further and restraining France’s demands for
security before disarmament. The Poles reacted very strongly in March
1933 to Nazi activities in Danzig, ostentatiously reinforcing their troops
on the Westerplatte; but thereafter they allowed themselves to be molli-
fied by German approaches. The belief, encouraged by Polonophil
historians after 1945, that Marshal Pilsudski, Poland’s dictator since 1926,
had proposed to France a pre-emptive strike against Germany, would
seem to be mistaken. Only the Soviets, already alarmed by Japanese
pressure on their interests in Manchuria and along the Amur river,
reacted positively against Hitler. In the summer of 1933, the Soviets
ended the clandestine co-operation with the German Reichswehr. And
Soviet diplomacy began to orient itself strongly towards France.
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To the British, their intelligence on Hitler’s measures clandestinely to
rearm Germany was alarming; though British opinion had already
accepted that some measure of German rearmament was inevitable.
Hitler’s speech of 17 May 1933 supporting the British disarmament plan,
released to the Geneva Disarmament Conference in March 1933, was taken
as proof that he could restrain his hotheads, while, to Mussolini, Hitler
represented at first a welcome ally against the expansion of French
influence in eastern Europe and the pro-French bloc of Little Entente
countries in the League of Nations. In March 1933 Mussolini had
proposed a Four Power Pact between Britain, France, Germany and Italy,
with the aim of substituting a Great Power tetrarchy for the parliament-
arianism of the League of Nations (which he found offensive), and of
securing an agreed revision of the 1919 Peace Settlements in eastern
Europe. The pact itself was concluded, in a very emasculated form, on
7 June 1933. This was followed by the Austrian crisis as Hitler stepped up
radio propaganda, economic pressure on and sabotage within Austria,
and Dolfuss appealed for British support against Germany and permission
to increase the size of the Austrian army to 30,000 by the recruitment of a
short-service militia. Britain and France issued a joint demarche in Berlin
on 7 August 1933 and Mussolini assured Dolfuss of Italian military
support in return for Dolfuss’s strengthening his regime’s anti-Socialist
stance.
Common opposition to Hitler’s designs in Austria was gradually to
ease Franco-Italian tension. More important in the circumstances of the
summer of 1933 was the effect of this German pressure on Austria, when
taken with reports of German clandestine rearmament, on Anglo-French
relations and the fate of the Disarmament Conference. The British Cabinet
realised that their hopes of any success in this one remaining area where
international co-operation still seemed to function had been much affected
by Hitler’s actions. For the first time France’s fears for her security did not
seem over-exaggerated. Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary,
therefore accepted a French proposal that an agreed international super-
visory system should be set up and tested in practice for a period of four
years before German equality of rights in the field of armaments was
accepted. A British draft incorporating this revision of the MacDonald
draft was therefore submitted to the Disarmament Conference in October
1933. On 14 October 1933 Hitler replied by withdrawing Germany not
only from the conference but also from the League of Nations.
The combination of Japanese and German withdrawal from the League
in the same year set fire to British anxieties as to the very weak state of her
armed forces, especially in the light of reports of German rearmament in
the air. In the winter of 1933-4 the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee
of the British Committee of Imperial Defence laboured over the problems
of British defence deficiencies. Their final report, given to the Cabinet in
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February 1934, pinpointed the dangers to British security from Japan and
Germany. The arms programme they recommended struck the British
Treasury as beyond the capacity of Britain’s economy, still weak from the
strains of 1931, to support. With the consideration by the full Cabinet of
the D.R.C. report began a debate, in which arguments of financial weak-
ness in the face of the costs of adequate rearmament were used to urge a
policy of avoidance of conflict by judicious concession, which was to
persist until the winter of 1938.
The Defence Requirements Committee judged Japan the closer in time
to aggression against British interests, but Germany the greater threat to
them in the long run. Their report led to a serious examination of the
possibilities of an understanding with Japan, seemingly more rather than
less belligerent as a result of her success in Manchuria. Japanese aggres-
siveness was fired in the winter of 1933 by the increasing evidence of
Chinese willingness to turn to Europe for aid and assistance in making
herself a modem power. T. V. Soong, the Chinese Finance Minister, was
active in Europe and in Washington. The number of League of Nations
advisory and assistance missions to China seemed on the increase. For
modernisation of her armed forces, China turned to Germany, inviting
Field-Marshal von Seeckt, architect of the German army after 1919, to
advise on the development of an elite army; a German military mission
and Italian and American air missions were active in training the Chinese
armed forces. The Japanese authorities felt again the threat to their
position in the Far East that a China modernised in her military forces,
economically healthy and politically united, would constitute. On 17 April
1934 Eiji Amau, spokesman of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, issued a
statement claiming a special position for Japan in the maintenance of
peace in the Far East and proclaiming Japanese opposition to all foreign
military and economic aid to China, whether bilateral or multilateral.
The British government protested very forcefully against the Amau
statement. Thereafter, however, it made strenuous efforts to persuade the
United States authorities into a joint policy on naval disarmament, which
would counter the more extreme nationalist elements in Japanese policy.
Both the Washington and London Naval Treaties were due to expire at
the end of 1936, and both Japan and France were threatening to denounce
them. The prospect of a new naval arms race — twelve of Britain’s fifteen
capital ships were due for replacement after 1936 — gave their efforts an
added spur; the more so as the Cabinet apparently concluded in June
1934 that what little revenue could be spared for Britain’s defence
deficiencies should be spent on remedying Britain’s virtually total defence-
lessness in the air, and that naval construction would have at the least to
be postponed. They failed, however, to carry the United States with them,
since the Americans were persuaded that Japan’s financial strength was
itself not adequate to the demands of a major naval role or the hazard of
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war. Japan duly denounced the naval treaties on 31 December 1934. Her
encroachments into north China continued throughout the following year.
The German withdrawal from the League had been rather differently
viewed in London and in Paris. In their attempt to save something from
the wreck the British government had turned to the idea of agreeing to
legitimise German rearmament in return for some German contribution to
international security. French reactions were delayed by a serious internal
crisis arising from the Stavisky financial scandal and the right wing
demonstrations which accompanied it (ch. xvn). The Doumergue Cabinet
set up on 7 February 1934, with Louis Barthou as Foreign Secretary, leant
very heavily towards the idea of containing Germany by agreements with
Italy and the Soviet Union. Litvinov’s preference for collective agreements
led him and Barthou on 18 May 1934 to propose an Eastern Security
agreement on the lines of the Treaty of Locarno to be backed by a Franco-
Soviet pact of assistance. The French Cabinet had already made it clear
that Britain’s schemes were unacceptable when on 17 April they used the
occasion of an increase in Germany’s defence budget to turn down flat a
German offer, elicited by British and Italian mediation, to l imi t her new
army to three hundred thousand short-service men with only ‘defensive’
arms.
Germany was well armoured against the Eastern Locarno proposals by
the successful culmination of Hitler’s wooing of Poland in the German-
Polish non-aggression pact of 26 January 1934. The Poles viewed with
suspicion and hostility the French efforts to redress the European balance
by calling in Soviet Russia. And, despite Barthou’s efforts, undertaken
under British pressure during Barthou’s visit to London 9-1 1 July 1934, to
make the proposals formally less obviously designed to control Germany
and to diminish Poland’s international status, both Germany, on 10 Sept-
ember, and Poland, on 27 September, 1934, had no difficulty in finding
pretexts to reject them. The deterioration in Germany’s international
position in 1934 came not from the rapprochement between France and
Russia but from her own internal crisis and from the breakdown of
Hitler’s Austrian policy.
Since the summer of 1933, German pressure on Austria had driven
Dolfuss steadily into the arms of Mussolini, a development encouraged if
anything by France and Britain, despite Dolfuss’s own efforts to maintain a
degree of independence. In January 1934 the Italians virtually ordered him
to suppress the Austrian Social Democrats by force. The resultant
military action, taken on 12-16 February, so alienated opinion in Britain
and France as to make Dolfuss Italy’s prisoner. On 17 February the
British, French and Italian governments issued a joint declaration on the
necessity of maintaining Austria’s ‘independence and integrity’. But the
real situation was shown on 17 March, when representatives of Italy,
Austria and Hungary signed the Rome Protocols, providing for joint
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consultation. Hungarian opposition prevented the Italians strengthening
this into a Customs Union. But the result established Italy firmly in central
Europe, where stability now rested on an uneasy balance between Italy’s
revisionist associates and France’s allies in the Little Entente. A Franco-
Italian break would deliver them all equally into German hands.
For the moment Hitler preferred to force the pace. Meeting with
Mussolini in Venice on 15-16 June, he believed he had secured Italian
support for his hopes of securing the entry of prominent Austrian Nazis
into the Dolfuss Cabinet. The degree of his error was revealed in the after-
math of the putsch attempted, probably without his complete fore-
knowledge, by a group of Austrian S.S. on 25 July (ch. xvi). Their murder
of Dolfuss not only shocked world opinion, already severely shaken by
Hitler’s purge of the leadership of the German S.A., together with
selected former enemies and rivals, on 30 June 1934, but it provoked
Mussolini to move four divisions to the Italian border with Austria — and
laid the way open for direct Franco-Italian co-operation against Germany.
The main remaining obstacle to this co-operation was Yugoslav fear of
Italy. Yugoslavia in fact answered the move of Italian troops to the
Brenner by a similar military movement. Attempting to remove these
Yugoslav anxieties, on 9 October 1934, Barthou fell victim, together with
King Alexander of Yugoslavia, to assassination by Croat terrorists,
formerly organised, trained and financed by Italian and Hungarian
authorities.
Barthou’s successor, the former Premier, Pierre Laval, continued his
policy, while altering the emphasis. As between Italy and the Soviet Union
he preferred Italian support. And he thought much more of conciliating
than of coercing Germany. His preference thus lay more for a Europe of the
Four Power Pact thana Soviet alliance. And he revived the Eastern Locarno
scheme as a means of avoiding that alliance, rather than, as Barthou had
designed it, as a screen for its conclusion. His amiability towards Germany
led him to co-operate in a tranquil settlement of the Saar question, where,
under League supervision, a plebiscite held on 13 January 1935 duly voted
the territory reunited with Germany. His main effortwentinto the approach
to Italy. On 7 January 1935, meeting Mussolini in Rome, he concluded
with him a series of agreements which settled all the outstanding colonial
issues between them, and recognised Italian pre-eminence in Abyssinia,
while aligning the two countries in Europe in favour of a Danubian
Pact against any threat to Austrian independence, and against any uni-
lateral repudiation by Germany of the restrictions on her freedom to re-
arm imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Military staff conventions, actually
negotiated in June 1935, supplemented and reinforced these agreements.
Meanwhile the British Cabinet had emerged from its examination of
Britain’s defence deficiencies profoundly disturbed by the intelligence of
Germany’s clandestine rearmament, but very undecided what to do about
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it. Some pressed for condemnation of Germany and encouragement of
Franco-Italian co-operation. But the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon,
and his supporters still hoped to barter the legitimisation of German
rearmament for a comprehensive European settlement which would
satisfy British — and French — anxieties on security. Germany should re-
join the League, accept the Eastern Locarno and the declaration of
February 1934 on Austria. Simon urged these ideas on Laval in Paris on
22 December 1934.
More detailed Anglo-French talks followed in London on 1-3 February
1935. The French ministers showed themselves determined not to accept
the British scheme unless their own security vis-a-vis Germany was in-
creased. They proposed an air convention to guarantee the signatories of
Locarno against sudden air attack, which contemporary opinion believed
could well prove so overwhelming in its strength as to make conventional
invasion by land unnecessary. The final communique of 3 February 1935
outlined such a scheme to be part of a general settlement which would
also include an agreed abrogation of Part v of the Treaty of Versailles. The
proposal was put to the German government. But Hitler sensed in it
Britain’s reluctance to take any stronger action. And, when the British
government sought on 4 March to justify a measure of rearmament by
reference to Germany, and the French proposed to increase the period of
conscript service from one to two years, Hitler seized the occasion to
denounce Part v of Versailles unilaterally and to proclaim the reintroduc-
tion of conscription in Germany.
His action nearly resulted in the cancellation of the visit to Berlin
planned by Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden. Despite French and Italian
misgivings, however, they went ahead, holding prolonged conversations
with Hitler over 25-26 March. Hitler, who had in the meantime also
announced the formation of a German air force, overwhelmed the two
ministers with protestations of his friendship for Britain. The only positive
proposal he made, however, was of an Anglo-German agreement which
would exclude naval competition between the two countries. This was of
some interest to that section of British official opinion that was worried
by British naval weakness and the threat from Japan. The main British
reaction to the visit, however, was the increased need for Britain to
mediate between France and Italy and Germany.
The need was the more urgent in that France had summoned Britain
and Italy to a conference at Stresa on the German action and also appealed
to the Council of the League of Nations. More importantly still Laval
had been driven by his colleagues to the final stage of the Franco-Soviet
negotiations. At Stresa on 1 1-14 April the French and Italian statesmen
decided on staff agreements, concluded in May and June 1935, on military
and air collaboration against German aggression in Austria or on the
Rhine. All Sir John Simon could do for Britain was to prevent the final
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communique being too open in its condemnation of Germany. At the
Council meeting in Geneva on 15-17 April the pattern was repeated.
And on 2 May 1935 with the blessing of her allies in eastern Europe,
including Rumania but not Poland, the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual
Assistance, whose provisions would operate even without unanimous
agreement in the Council of the League, was signed in Paris. A Soviet-
Czech pact on similar lines, save that it only became operative after the
invocation of the Franco-Soviet pact, was signed on 16 May in Prague.
The conclusion of the Franco-Soviet pact marked the pinnacle of French
policy against Germany. But its basis was almost immediately to be
destroyed by the conclusion of the Anglo-German Naval agreement of
18 June 1935, and the Italian attack on Abyssinia, which brought Italy
into direct conflict with Britain and the League of Nations. Hitler’s offer
to discuss naval armaments with Britain fitted into the scheme Britain was
evolving for a new naval treaty to replace those Japan had denounced. But,
on the arrival of a German delegation in London on 5 June, led by Hitler’s
personal ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Germans refused to
take part in any naval talks unless the British accepted a bilateral agree-
ment fixing German naval strength at 35 per cent of that of the British
Commonwealth. The British Cabinet accepted this as something which
would at least tie Hitler down in one sphere. But European opinion saw
in the agreement British condonation of Germany’s denunciation of
Versailles. French and Italian reaction was particularly bitter.
The conclusion of the agreement coincided with a marked sharpening
in Anglo-Italian relations over Abyssinia. Italian designs on Abyssinia
dated back to before their defeat at Abyssinian hands at Adowa in 1896.
In 1906 Britain, France and Italy had agreed to divide Abyssinia into
spheres of influence, Italy obtaining the lion’s share, in the event of a
breakdown in Abyssinian government. During the period of Franco-
Italian rivalry in Abyssinia in the 1920s, France and Germany sponsored
Abyssinia’s admission to the League of Nations, although Abyssinia was
still an anarchic-feudal state, ridden with slavery, the writ of whose
central government ran only fitfully through its territories. Britain had
declared her lack of interest in the whole of Abyssinia save the headwaters
of the Nile in Lake Tana, in the Anglo-Italian exchange of notes of
December 1925. The Italo-Abyssinian Agreement of 2 August 1928
seemed to have given Italy the necessary springboard for establishing her
economic predominance there.
By 1934, however, it was clear that the new Negus of Abyssinia, Haile
Selassie, was determined to resist Italian encroachment. That same year
Mussolini seems to have decided to use his central position as Austria’s
guarantor to secure Abyssinia and round off his East African dominions.
A frontier incident at Wal-Wal, a group of wells in the undemarcated
frontier areas between Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia, provided an
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excuse for action, the more so as Abyssinia rejected Italian protests and
appealed to the League. At their meeting in Rome on 3-7 January
Mussolini had secured Laval’s agreement to the establishment of Italian
predominance in Abyssinia ; though it seems unlikely that Laval expected
Mussolini to challenge the League of Nations by using force. But similar
Italian efforts to secure British cognisance failed in the light of the aroused
state of British opinion against Italy after Abyssinia’s appeal to the
League. British and French attempts to mediate between Italy and
Abyssinia were similarly thwarted by exaggerated Abyssinian confidence
in the ability of the League to restrain Italy.
By the middle of June 1935, the British Cabinet, reinforced in their
conviction that no direct British interests were involved by the report of
a commission headed by Sir John Maffey, were caught in the cross-
pressures between the violently anti-Italian sentiments of British opinion,
the reluctance of their diplomatic advisers to do anything which would
antagonise Italy and drive her into Germany’s arms, and the advice of the
Chiefs of Staff that Britain’s arms were hardly adequate for war with
Italy and that the inevitable losses attendant on such a war might well so
weaken the navy as to destroy its chances of deterring Japan from
aggression in the Far East.
In June, with Eden’s visit to Rome, and again in Paris in tripartite
Anglo-Franco-Italian talks, the British attempted in vain to persuade the
Italians to accept some kind of economic advantage in Abyssinia and to
abandon their plans for military occupation. Their failure led them to
accept that the Covenant of the League, especially Article xvi with its
provisions for economic sanctions, would have to be invoked; but that,
to be effective, and to avoid a purely bilateral conflict with Italy, Britain
could go no further or faster than she could carry the French, whose
military and naval co-operation in the Mediterranean was deemed essen-
tial. To rally the opinion of the smaller powers who would have little to
risk and much to gain from successful League action against Italy was to
prove much easier than to move the French. Sir Samuel Hoare’s speech of
1 1 September to the Assembly of the League of Nations (he had succeeded
Sir John Simon as Foreign Secretary in June) produced an illusion of
world unity against aggression which Laval’s reluctance to estrange France
from her one ally against Germany was to deprive of any real power
against Italy.
Sure of French obstructionism, Italy duly attacked Abyssinia on
3 October. The League replied by denouncing Italy as an aggressor and
invoking economic sanctions against her (ch. ix). The detailed examination
of the goods, export of which to Italy was to be embargoed, revealed a
good deal of special pleading. Austria and Hungary refused to take part;
and Soviet exports to Italy showed little variation from their normal level.
The real sticking point, however, was the extension of the embargo to oil,
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coal and steel, a proposal on which Laval successfully postponed discus-
sion until well into the New Year. British attempts to secure more
determined French support met with French reluctance to do anything
without a definite promise in return of British military aid should Germany
remilitarise her Rhineland frontier with France. This gave added induce-
ment to British attempts to evolve with Laval’s aid a formula with which
they could mediate between Italy and Abyssinia. The final details of such a
formula were settled between Hoare and Laval in Paris on 7-8 December
1935. They envisaged the retention by Italy of most of the areas of
Abyssinia then under her military occupation, and the establishment of a
still wider zone in which, under League auspices, Italian economic pre-
dominance was to be linked with the economic development of Abyssinia.
In return Abyssinia was to be given direct access to the sea by the cession
to her of part of Italian Eritrea.
The plan, leaked to the Parisian press, raised such a storm of public
denunciation both in Britain and France as to destroy its signatories. But
Eden, who succeeded Sir Samuel Hoare as British Foreign Secretary,
appeared to have no alternative policy other than that of waiting until the
rainy season in Abyssinia ended active military hostilities and made a new
mediation possible. Flandin, who succeeded Laval in France, remained as
determined to resist the introduction of oil sanctions as his predecessor,
while devoting even more effort to attempting to secure from Britain
reinforced guarantees against German violation of Locarno. In this
Flandin had no more success than had Laval. Indeed the new British
Foreign Secretary, having concluded that the Rhineland was not an issue
on which Britain should go to war, was once again being lured by the idea
of using Hitler’s alleged desire to free himself from Versailles legitimately
as a means of securing a European settlement.
The idea was as ill timed as it was ill considered. During the long winter
of 1935-6, Mussolini had been gradually making it plain to Hitler that he
would no longer stand by France. In mid-February 1936 Hitler took
preliminary soundings in Rome preparatory to the remilitarisation of the
Rhineland. And on 7 March 1936 he sent small peace-time garrisons into
the Rhineland towns, taking care, however, not to come too close to the
frontier, accompanying his action with an offer to return to the League of
Nations and to conclude non-aggression pacts with all Germany’s
neighbours.
The action could not have come at a worse moment for the French
government. Of her east European allies only Czechoslovakia and Rumania
supported her. The Yugoslavs prevaricated. The Poles offered to honour
their alliance; but this only became operative if German troops crossed
the French frontier, which was not the issue. The Belgian government,
driven by the need to secure Flemish support for their own rearmament
programme, had only the previous day given notice to terminate the
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Franco-Belgian alliance. The failure of economic sanctions against Italy
virtually ruled out any hope of League action against Germany. And the
French army, entrenched behind the great fortifications of the Maginot
Line, contemplated an inroad into the Rhineland only with the utmost
reluctance.
The French government appealed to the signatories of Locarno and to
the members of the Council of the League of Nations. But they appealed in
vain. The refusal of the Belgian government, from a country much weaker
than France whose security was equally affected by the German action,
to associate themselves with the French demands greatly weakened their
stance; while German diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on a
number of the weaker members of the Council. The crucial role, however,
was played by Britain, where opinion had been captured by Hitler’s offer
to return to the League and negotiate a general European settlement, and
whose only available military support was tied up in the Mediterranean
against Italy. Assurances were given to France and Belgium of British
military assistance in the event of a German attack ; and preliminary staff
talks were in fact held in London on 15-17 April 1936. But the main
British effort was devoted to trying to pin Hitler down to new talks on
security in western Europe. The negotiations were to drag on until the
end of 1937, Eden’s patience being matched by the procrastination of the
Germans. But in these fourteen months the whole shape of Europe had
changed (cf. below, pp. 740-1).
The collapse of sanctions against Italy after the Italian entry into Addis
Ababa on 6 May 1936 a month ahead of the rainy season on which Eden’s
hopes of a mediated settlement had been pinned, and the German success
in remilitarising the Rhineland without Western molestation, werefollowed
by a wholesale withdrawal by the smaller nations of the League from the
previous systems of collective security. In the Council of the Little
Entente, Rumanian leadership secured a renewed avowal of support for
collective security at its Belgrade meeting on 6-7 May. But the Rumanian
Foreign Minister, Nicolai Titulescu, was manoeuvred out of office at the
end of August and thereafter Rumania edged closer to Germany and
Italy. Yugoslavia took pains to reduce the old tension in her relations with
Italy and Hungary, and initiated negotiations with Bulgaria which were to
lead to the conclusion of a pact of friendship in January of the following
year. The Greek Premier, General Metaxas, used the meeting of the
Balkan powers in Belgrade on 4-6 May to make it clear that Greece would
accept no obligations outside the Balkan peninsula.
A major German trade offensive along the Danube was also not without
influence on some of the Balkan states. That this offensive did not have
the far-reaching effects attributed to it at the time is shown however by the
case of Turkey. She took pains to secure her Mediterranean frontiers by
maintaining good relations with Britain and doing what she could to
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improve them with Italy. Her main effort, however, was put into her more
immediately Asian frontiers. In July 1936 she convened a conference at
Montreux which, against bitter Soviet opposition, gave her complete
freedom to refortify the Dardanelles. In September she protested bitterly
at the French agreement with the nationalists of Syria, looking towards
Syrian autonomy, and opened a crisis which was only ended in May 1937
after the intervention of the League Council, separating the Hatay, the
partly Turkish-inhabited province of Alexandretta, from Syria and placing
it under a special regime. And in July 1937 she mediated successfully
between Iran and Iraq, and brought them together with Afghanistan into
the so-called Oriental Entente, signed at the Shah’s summer palace at
Sa’dabad on 8 July 1937.
Sanctions against Italy were in fact lifted by the League on 15 July 1936.
On 1 July the Foreign Ministers of the four Scandinavian countries, and of
Holland, Spain and Switzerland, signed a joint declaration expressing their
unreadiness to accept any future application of sanctions. The Scandin-
avian states were to go on to a much more far-reaching declaration at
Copenhagen two years later (23 July 1938), together with Holland,
Belgium and Luxemburg. Switzerland also made clear her return to the
traditional tenets of neutrality.
The most far-reaching developments, however, were in Belgium and in
the United States. The Belgians began by accepting staff talks with Britain.
But, as it became clear that Germany had no intention of concluding a new
collective treaty of guarantee with her western neighbours, the Belgian
king issued on 14 October 1936 the text of a speech to the Cabinet pro-
claiming a new policy ‘exclusively Belgian’, aimed at ‘placing us apart
from the conflicts of our neighbours’. On 24 April 1937 the French and
British governments agreed reluctantly to release her from the terms of
Locarno, while reaffirming their own guarantees of Belgian integrity and
on 13 October the German government followed suit.
The events of 1935-6 were watched with equal concern in the United
States. The League embargo on trade with Italy was answered by an
embargo on arms trade with Italy. But the administration had no power to
impose a more far-reaching embargo and American trade in oil, trucks,
iron and steel with Italy nearly doubled in the month of October. The
Hoare-Laval proposals destroyed attempts to secure a ‘moral embargo’,
and led the isolationist and pacifist elements to propose far more drastic
neutrality legislation, leaving little or no discretion to the President. The
debate raged over the years 1936-7. The final Neutrality Act of 1 May 1937
put an automatic embargo on arms sales, loans, travel on belligerent ships
and arming of American ships trading with belligerents. Other exports to
belligerents could be brought, at the President’s discretion, under the
requirement that all title to them should be transferred to the belligerent
purchasing them before the goods left the United States, the so-called
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‘Cash-and-Carry’ clause. Its effect was virtually to close the American
arms industry to Britain and France, and to face the British government
with the need, in any war against Germany, to finance the war on cash
and not, as in 1914-18, on credit.
The most crucial effects of the events of October 1935-March 1936
were however felt by the states on Germany’s south-eastern frontier,
Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Italo-Abyssinian war destroyed Italy’s
ability and willingness to come to Austria’s help. The Austrians turned
briefly to Prague and Belgrade. But negotiations failed on the insistence of
the Slav powers that the Austrian authorities should formally renounce any
intention of restoring the Habsburgs — an infringement of Schuschnigg’s
monarchical plans which he was unwilling to accept. Thereafter the
internal struggle for power in Austria and Mussolini’s preference for an
Austrian alignment with Germany rather than the western democracies
drove Schuschnigg to make his peace with Germany. By the so-called
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ of 11 July 1936 Germany recognised Austria’s
independence and promised non-intervention into her internal affairs.
In return Schuschnigg agreed to allow representatives of the Austrian
national opposition (i.e. pro-German but not overtly Nazi) into his
Cabinet, promised to conduct a foreign policy parallel to Germany’s, and
allowed the German press full freedom to circulate in Austria. Ostensibly
a settlement, in fact the agreement amounted only to a temporary licence
to survive granted by Germany to Austria. As for Czechoslovakia, she
was now totally isolated in central Europe, her only protection the willing-
ness of France to court a general European war to protect her.
The events of this crucial period had, in fact, totally shattered the inter-
national order established in the 1920s in Europe, and had revealed only
too thoroughly the military and psychological inability of the principal
European guarantors of that order to defend it against unilateral revision.
They had revealed too that, despite the illusion of collectivity established
by the Covenant of the League of Nations, the only real defence of that
collectivity lay with the European great powers. The principal of those
powers, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, were, however, under
continuing pressure throughout the period, as a result of the earlier break
of security in 193 1-3 in the Far East. The year 1934, as earlier related, had
seen an abortive attempt by Britain to sound out the possibilities of a new
Pacific settlement — defeated by the continuing unwillingness of the United
States either to accept a settlement favourable to Japan or to join Britain
in setting up a barrier against further Japanese encroachments. It had also
seen the elimination by Soviet Russia of any commitments in advance of
her own Asiatic frontiers by the negotiation of the sale of her interests in
the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan. The final transfer of those interests
was agreed in March 1935. The Russians coupled this, however, by greatly
strengthening their position in Outer Mongolia and in Sinkiang. The Far
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Eastern army was heavily reinforced and a policy adopted of answering
any trangressions of the frontier by Japanese troops by immediate counter-
attack. There was a succession of military clashes with Japanese forces
throughout 1935 along the frontiers between Manchuria and Outer
Mongolia. On 12 March 1936 the Soviets signed a Protocol of Mutual
Assistance with the Mongolian authorities.
The main Japanese effort in 1935-6, however, was directed into China.
It took two forms. From Tokyo Japanese diplomatic pressure was
exerted both to attempt to exclude Western aid to China and to bring
China herself into subordinate alliance with Japan. In northern China, the
Kwantung army and its offshoots sought to expand Japanese influence into
the five provinces of northern China. The principal Japanese weapon was
presented to them quite gratuitously by the United States, where, under the
pressure of senators from the mountain states, legislation was adopted in
August 1934 to raise the dollar price of silver. The effect was to drain
China steadily of the silver which was essential to back her currency. In
October 1934 the Chinese government attempted to end the export of
silver by imposing a massive export duty on it; but the only effect was
an immense increase in smuggling, at once seized on and encouraged by
the Japanese as a weapon of economic pressure both against the Chinese
government and against Western, mainly British, economic and financial
interests in China. Under the threat of an imminent collapse of their
currency the Chinese appealed both to Britain and to the United States for
financial assistance. The United States was unwilling either to intervene or
to modify their silver legislation. The British hoped still to maintain the
status quo in the Far East in view of the increasing threats in Europe.
They were, however, again unable to carry the United States with them,
and swung therefore gradually towards a more outspoken criticism of
Japanese actions which they backed by dispatching Sir Frederick Leith-
Ross, principal Economic Adviser to the Cabinet, to China to advise on
currency reform.
In the meantime Japanese diplomatic pressure was expressed in a series
of negotiations carried out throughout the year with Chiang Kai-Shek
and the Chinese Premier, Wang Ching-Wei. Wang was inclined to favour
agreement with Japan on any terms, but the publication in October
1935 by the Japanese Premier, Hirota, of his ‘Three Principles’ for a
settlement, when taken with the activities of the Kwantung army in north
China, caused a great surge of popular anti-Japanese feeling such as to
render any settlement with Japan on these terms a political impossibility.
The ‘Three Principles’ were: an anti-Communist alliance; the abandon-
ment of attempts to play off one foreign nation against another; economic
‘collaboration’ in terms heavily weighted in Japan’s favour. These terms,
first advanced early in May 1935, were not, however, far-reaching enough
for the Kwantung army, which in May 1935 began a series of operations in
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Jehol, Hopei and Inner Mongolia designed to withdraw these provinces
completely from control by Peking and turn them into Japanese satellites.
The Ho-Umetsu agreement of 6 July 1935 established what they wanted in
Jehol. In November 1935 the establishment of the Hopei-Chahar Political
Council gave them what they wanted in these two provinces.
The Leith-Ross mission attained nothing so far as the Japanese were
concerned. But it did help the Chinese to solve some of their economic
problems by nationalising silver in November 1935. American agreement
to the purchase of fifty million ounces of silver the same month was of
further assistance in establishing a new basis for China’s currency.
Shortly thereafter the price of silver in the United States returned to its
normal level. Encouraged by this the Chinese, with British advice, ad-
justed the existing terms to British bond holders on to a much easier basis
and embarked on an ambitious programme of railway and industrial
expansion in which British, French and German firms participated on a
bilateral basis; and in April 1936 Chiang concluded an extensive arms
agreement with Germany in which raw materials were bartered against
extensive arms deliveries.
The Japanese reaction to all these developments was extreme. On the
one hand the Japanese army opened negotiations secretly with von
Ribbentrop as Hitler’s representative for an agreement to combat the
Soviets. On the other hand the internal struggle broke out in February
1936 into a mutiny by one faction of the army and an attempted coup
d'etat in Tokyo. Its defeat, paradoxically, greatly enhanced the political
strength of the rival faction — so much so that the Japanese Foreign
Ministry was overruled, and negotiations with Germany for the Anti-
Comintern Pact were renewed. One aim was to secure a diminution of
German aid to China. More important, however, was to secure Japan’s
northern frontiers with the Soviet Union so as to make possible a more
vigorous drive into China and the South Seas. The ‘Basic Principles of
National Policy’ adopted by the Japanese Cabinet on 11 August 1936,
despite a certain genuflexion to the need to maintain friendly relations and
to attain her aims by peaceful means, made it clear that the ‘ Imperial Way ’
to be followed by Japan was one of ‘ overseas expansion ’ and the establish-
ment of the nation as the ‘stabilising power’ in East Asia.
The Anti-Comintern Pact was signed in Berlin on 25 November 1936.
Its public terms spoke entirely of joint agreement to combat international
Communism, and invited the participation of other states. A secret
protocol signed on 24 October bound the signatories to support each
other diplomatically, though not militarily, if either were involved in war
with the Soviet Union. Its terms were immediately known, through
intelligence channels, to the Soviet Union and to Britain. And the sub-
sequent efforts of the Japanese Foreign Office to exploit it diplomatically
by negotiating a rapprochement with Britain were watched with as much
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alarm in Moscow as they were greeted with suspicion in London. The
various commissions, etc., set up by the pact never functioned, its import-
ance being mainly symbolic and the use made of it by the two signatories
mainly propagandists. In Germany it was the work of von Ribbentrop,
rather than the Foreign Ministry, who found much more importance in
the negotiation of the agreements of 21 October 1936 with Italy, which
marked the formation of the Axis.
The driving force in the negotiations which led to the signature of the
German-Italian agreements in October 1936 and to Mussolini’s speech of
2 November proclaiming the Axis was provided by Italy rather than by
Germany. Italy had greeted the end of sanctions with a good deal of
suspicion; and Mussolini and his entourage were inclined to use the de
jure recognition of Italy’s conquest in Abyssinia and of the king of Italy as
the real yardstick by which they judged the goodwill of those states which
had so lately been applying sanctions against them. Mussolini had, in fact,
emerged from the conquest of Abyssinia convinced of British hostility
towards him and of the need for closer relations with Germany. In time,
these convictions might have subsided — there were after all plenty of
potential causes of German-Italian friction, especially over Germany’s new
trade drive in the Balkans and in German relations with Yugoslavia. But
the election of a government of the Centre and Left in France in June 1936
under the leadership of M. Blum the French Socialist (the so-called
‘Popular Front’ government), and still more the outbreak of civil war in
Spain on 15 July 1936, provided him with a completely new set of reasons
for cleaving to Germany.
In its origins the revolt of the Spanish generals on 15 July 1936 against
the Centre-Left government elected in January 1936 sprang from purely
Spanish causes. There is little or no evidence of prior knowledge of the
generals’ plans by either Germany or Italy (although Italian arms had been
being given to Spanish right-wing groups under an agreement concluded
in 1934). But, once their revolt had failed to overturn the Spanish govern-
ment in the way military pronunciamentos had so often overturned
Spanish governments in the past, the Spanish military leadership used
every available channel to appeal to Italy and Germany for arms; and,
within a fortnight of the outbreak of the civil war, Italian and German
arms and aircraft were flooding into the Spanish military strongholds in
Majorca and in Morocco.
In its turn the Spanish government appealed for military aid to France.
The Blum government was deeply divided, and the British advice, given
to Blum when he visited London at the end of July, at best was hostile to
the Spanish government. British conservative opinion had been bitterly
shocked by the anti-clerical excesses and the massacres of nationalists in
government-held territory; and the British government dreaded the
danger of yet another European war springing from Spanish causes, as
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had the war of 1870-1. Delbos, Blum’s Foreign Minister, found a way out
of the dilemma by proposing an agreement between the European powers
not to intervene in Spain with arms supplies, financial support or volun-
teers. The proposal, accepted by all the powers by the end of August 1936,
led in turn to the proposal of an international committee to supervise the
agreement. But by the date of its first meeting on 9 September 1936 it was
clear that the agreement was not being honoured. Portugal, Germany and
Italy were pouring arms into Spain in support of the Spanish nationalists;
and early in September the first cargoes of Soviet arms and advisers
began to reach the Spanish government forces. At the same time, Comin-
tern agents began to take hold of the small groups of non-Spanish volun-
teers fighting with the Spanish government forces, to build out of them the
International Brigade. As the Spanish nationalist forces were beaten off in
their first assault on Madrid, so Germany and Italy in turn sent military
units, euphemistically described as ‘volunteers’, to supplement and spear-
head the nationalist attack on the capital, and on the Basque republic in
the north. For the next eighteen months, European diplomacy was
dominated by the issues arising from the war in Spain.
German motives in this were quite clear. Initially, their main motives
were economic : the lure of Spanish copper and other mi neral resources.
From that, Hitler developed the hope of a Franco-Italian war in the
Mediterranean which would enable him to settle accounts with Austria
and Czechoslovakia. German military involvement in Spain was thus
strictly limited to armour and aircraft, German military strategists
profiting by the opportunity to try out the Blitzkrieg tactics they had been
evolving in staff studies since the late 1920s. Soviet motives are more
obscure. The civil war in Spain was immensely useful to them as a means
of building up support in France for an anti-fascist front, and they got a
certain amount of propaganda value out of it in Britain. They attempted
to transform the Non-Intervention Committee into an instrument of
collective security. And, just as Hitler hoped to use the war to embroil
France with Italy, so they very well may have hoped to use the war to
embroil Britain and France with Germany, and divert Germany’s
military effort westwards.
The Russians were well informed as to the progress of German-
Japanese negotiations. And it was in this period that the great purges of
Stalin’s opponents began, purges which in the following year were to
strip the Soviet military leadership of all but a minute percentage of its
senior members and affect in all between 30 and 40 per cent of the entire
Soviet officer corps. The result was to destroy the image of Soviet military
power in Europe’s eyes and to remove any possible alternative source of
leadership in the Soviet Union apart from that of Stalin himself. It is
significant therefore that it was in this period, November 1936-February
1937, that Stalin chose to approach Hitler through the medium of David
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Kandelaki, a fellow-Georgian, the head of the Soviet trade mission in
Berlin, to propose a German-Soviet understanding. The approach was
rejected with the comment that such negotiations would be possible in the
future if Russia developed into an absolute despotism based on the military
— an ominous foreshadowing of the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939.
For the British and French governments the main motive in the policy
they followed in the Non-Intervention Committee was to attempt to
manoeuvre Germany and Italy into withdrawal from Spain, as a prelimin-
ary to yet another attempt to negotiate a European settlement. As the
war progressed, and Italian support of General Franco, the nationalist
leader, became more outrageously overt, so their own counsels became
more divided, Anthony Eden and successive French governments being
driven into a progressively more anti-Italian stance, while other elements,
most notably Neville Chamberlain, who became Prime Minister in
Britain at the end of May 1937, were driven to ignore Spain entirely in
their efforts to obtain an opening for new negotiations.
The Italian regime, by contrast, never seems thoroughly to have thought
out its reasons for intervening in Spain. Possibly Mussolini genuinely
believed his own propaganda, seeing himself the champion against a
would-be Soviet take-over in Spain. His efforts were so thwarted that
Italian aid to the Spanish nationalists gradually escalated until, especially
after the Italian defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937, withdrawal would
have been synonymous with defeat. Yet for Italy the Spanish adventure
was disastrous. Unpopular at home, it set Italy against Britain and France,
and drove her willy-nilly into Germany’s arms, while Germany steadily
took over her economic and political position in the Danube basin. In the
economic sphere it drained Italy of arms and money, and prevented any
recovery from the effects of sanctions. Spain converted Mussolini from
Hitler’s equal into his satellite.
Italy’s relations with Germany at least until the end of 1937 were made
continuously uneasy by the fears of an Anglo-German entente. Not only
did this govern the negotiations which led up to Count Ciano’s visit to
Berlin in October 1936 — the protocols then signed largely represented
Italian attempts to tie Germany down on issues such as relations with the
League of Nations, and on the negotiations for a security pact in western
Europe, where the Italians feared lest Germany’s desire for good relations
with Britain might lead Germany to accept proposals which would leave
Italy isolated. Even thereafter, the Italians found that they were forced to
moderate their own policy towards Britain in accordance with German
moves.
Their position was rendered the more difficult by the waiting game
Hitler was playing. In the summer of 1936 he launched a new rearmament
programme, the Four-Year Plan, designed to make Germany more self-
sufficient and to put her in a position to risk major war in Europe by 1940.
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In his relations with Britain he seemed, from his defence of his British
policy to Ciano in October 1936, still to have hoped to secure British
agreement to German hegemony in Europe by beating the anti-Comintern
drum. But the yardstick he selected during 1936-7 by which to test
Britain’s readiness to fall in with his plans was that of British willingness
to discuss the return to Germany of her former colonies. And on this
Britain was in no position to meet his demands, even had there been any
real support for the idea in Britain, since German South West Africa was
under South African control, and Australia had taken over the German
position in New Guinea. During his colonial propaganda campaign he
came to overestimate the fissiparous forces in the British Empire; and by
the end of 1937 he had apparently concluded that Britain was to be
counted permanently among his enemies. In the summer of 1937 the
new orders issued to the German armed forces for the first time envisaged
the possibility of war with Britain. The marked solidarity of Anglo-
French relations under Eden and Delbos presumably strengthened him in
this view. And there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that he regarded
the crisis which led to the abdication of Edward VIII, subsequently duke
of Windsor, in the winter of 1936-7, as the planned removal by the
Conservative leadership of a Germanophil monarch.
It is one of the many paradoxes and misunderstandings that led to the
outbreak of war between Germany and Britain in 1939 that Hitler’s change
in attitude towards Britain developed pari passu with the advent to power
in Britain of a man more determined to re-establish good relations with
Germany, if that were possible, than any of his predecessors. Neville
Chamberlain, the new British Prime Minister, was not the naive pacifist
his enemies depicted. He always regarded Germany as a disturbing, dis-
ruptive force. But he believed that it was essential to try to come to a
settlement in Europe if that were possible; and he was very impatient of
the formal obstacles placed in the way of such a settlement by the existing
treaty structure. From a strong supporter of collective action and sanc-
tions in 1935, he had by 1937 become a convinced advocate of bilateral
negotiation on the detailed removal of grievances between the major
powers.
He was impelled in these views by four main sets of considerations. The
Imperial Conference, which met in May 1937, revealed that the British
dominions were generally opposed to British involvement in a European
war. Treasury investigations, set on foot while he was still Chancellor of
the Exchequer, showed that Britain could not afford to attain the level of
armaments deemed necessary to enable her to contain Germany in
Europe, Italy in the Mediterranean and Japan in the Far East, nor
maintain the level of armaments deemed necessary to enable her to contain
Germany and Japan, once that level were attained — at least not without
permanently weakening the British economy. Chamberlain believed Japan
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to be genuinely unappeasable ; and he had little real confidence in American
willingness or ability to restrain Japan in China. Lastly, he was con-
vinced, not altogether wrongly, that a second war would be disastrous for
European civilisation, and that some kind of co-existence should be possible
once Germany’s and Italy’s legitimate grievances had been satisfied.
His advent to power was marked by three developments: the dispatch of
a new Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, with instructions to do
his utmost to improve Anglo-German relations; the invitation to the Ger-
man Foreign Minister, Baron von Neurath, to visit London; and the
initiation of direct contacts with Italy to end Anglo-Italian tension. The
first of these was disastrous; and a crisis in the Non-Intervention Com-
mittee enabled Baron von Neurath to evade the British invitation. Never-
theless the news of the invitation was enough to drive the Italians to take
up, momentarily, the idea of Anglo-Italian talks. Their action began a
series of contacts which was eventually to lead to the resignation of the
British Foreign Secretary, Eden, and the establishment of Chamberlain’s
policy and personality as dominant over all other trends of thought
within his Cabinet and party.
After the abandonment of sanctions against Italy in July 1936, Eden had
devoted a good deal of effort to re-establishing good relations. Once the
establishment of the Axis had removed Italian fears of isolation, Mussolini
had welcomed these moves and had concluded on 2 January 1937 the
so-called Anglo-Italian ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ on the status quo in
the Mediterranean. His secret dispatch of large contingents of Italian
‘volunteers’ to Spain both before and after the signature of the Agreement
was taken by Eden as evidence of Italian deceit. From February to June
1937 Anglo-Italian relations steadily deteriorated. Mussolini’s exploita-
tion of the Arab revolt in Palestine, with propaganda, money and arms
deliveries, greatly exacerbated this process. In July Italian fears of a new
Anglo-German rapprochement led to an exchange of letters between
Chamberlain and Mussolini; and an agreement to begin talks on a
settlement. But Italian submarine attacks on ships bound for Spanish
ports, which escalated at the end of August to the sinking of a British
merchant ship, the S.S. Woodford, and an attack on a British destroyer,
H.M.S. Havock, caused their suspension.
Instead Eden called an international conference at Nyon. The French,
who had originally proposed such a conference, supported him; and the
conference set up a system of international naval patrols in the Mediter-
ranean with orders to sink any unidentified submarine encountered, the
lion’s share of the patrolling being taken by British and French naval
units. Italian submarine activity was hastily suspended. Mussolini
retaliated, however, with a major military concentration in Libya, where
his troops could move with equal ease against the British in Egypt or the
French in Tunisia. And, while he was careful to reassure Britain and France
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of his willingness to resume talks, he was much more concerned to obtain
reassurance in his turn from Hitler. His visit to Berlin at the end of
September 1937 he had originally proposed as a central European con-
ference, including representatives of Poland, Austria, Hungary and
Yugoslavia. But Hitler was able to avoid the commitments which might
have emerged from such a meeting by playing on Mussolini’s vanity. The
meeting of the two dictators took place, as a result, with little or no
political conversation. Mussolini returned to Rome, more enthralled with
Hitler’s personality, but no stronger either in central Europe or in the
Mediterranean.
At the end of October 1937, then, the European position was as follows:
the Soviet Union was plunged in the nightmare of Stalin’s purges —
nominally allied to France and Czechoslovakia though there were no
military agreements to give the alliance teeth, doing her best in Spain and
at the League of Nations to embroil Britain and France with the Axis.
In central Europe, Czechoslovakia confronted Germany in isolation. Her
allies in the Little Entente had made their peace with the Axis powers —
her enemies, Poland and Hungary, had abated none of their enmity. Italy
and Germany were tied by an Axis, in which Germany was increasingly the
stronger partner, Italy apparently on a collision course with Britain and
France over Spain. The Scandinavian powers, Switzerland and Belgium
had retreated into neutrality. Britain and France were holding closely
together; but economic weakness was hampering their rearmament efforts
and, in France, the enemies of the government were becoming increasingly
pro-fascist. And in the Far East Japan was now engaged in full-scale
hostilities against China.
From the Japanese point of view, their situation in China had deterior-
ated markedly since the summer of 1936 despite the conclusion of the
Anti-Comintern Pact. The most alarming development had been the
conclusion of a truce between the Chinese nationalist government and the
Communists after the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-Shek by dissident
Chinese troops in December 1936. The basis of the truce was to be the
organisation of a common anti- Japanese front. While negotiations for such
a front were in progress, the Soviet authorities, who seem to have had no
hand in either the kidnapping or the negotiations between Chiang and the
Communists, proposed, in April 1937, a Soviet-Chinese mutual assistance
pact. Their main motive seems to have been anxiety over the Japanese
approaches to Britain mentioned earlier which continued until June 1937.
But a contributory factor may well have been their own military weakness
in consequence of the continuing military purges; although the full
weight of these was not felt in the Soviet Far Eastern forces until the
winter of 1937-8, an incident between Japanese and Soviet forces on the
Amur river in June 1937 had already led the Japanese military to write
off the Soviet Far Eastern army as demoralised by the purges.
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On 7 July 1937 fighting broke out between Japanese and Chinese forces
near the Marco Polo bridge in northern China. Local negotiations failed
and the incident, which, unlike that at Mukden in September 1931, does
not seem to have been planned on either side, escalated until the two
nations were locked in full-scale war. It was not to end until the Japanese
surrender, under the American atomic bombing, in August 1945. Over-
confidence and a great wave of anti-Japanese feeling in China was
answered by an increase of army strength and extreme nationalism in Japan
beyond the power of the more moderate political elements to control.
Peking fell to Japanese forces at the end of July and on 13 August fighting
spread to Shanghai. On 13 September the Chinese government appealed
to the League of Nations.
The Chinese appeal raised again the question of League sanctions, and
of the difficulty of organising pressure on Japan without prior agreement
with the United States, a difficulty felt most acutely by Britain and France.
But, whereas in 193 1-2 this situation had led to Anglo-French differences
and to Britain appearing to act as a brake on American initiative, British
anxieties over Shanghai and the confidence engendered by the close Anglo-
French co-operation in the Mediterranean now led Britain to be the
initiator, while the United States, led by Secretary of State Hull and
Roosevelt himself, supplied a very effective brake.
The first British approach to Washington was made shortly after the
initial Sino- Japanese incident. The proposal for a joint offer of ‘good
services’ was rejected, Hull professing to prefer parallel rather than joint
action, and seeing in the fighting an occasion for continuing the moral
education of the world against the use of force rather than for joint action
to prevent it. The prospect of the League invoking Article xvi against
Japan, however, led Britain to ignore this rebuff and invoke the Washing-
ton Nine Power Treaty of 1922. A conference of its signatories and other
powers duly met in Brussels at the beginning of November.
Before the conference could meet, however, President Roosevelt had
succeeded in confusing its members entirely by a speech, delivered at
Chicago on 5 October 1937, calling for a ‘ quarantine’ of aggressor states.
His ideas seem to have developed from the plan for common American
neutrality advanced by the American delegation at the Inter-American
Conference at Buenos Aires the preceding December; and, from his
subsequent reactions to Japanese acts against American interests in China,
the proposal seems to have marked a stage in his gradual movement
towards the idea of common economic action against states committing
aggression. As an idea it was hardly adequately developed enough to
warrant the intense international and national interest it aroused. Never
was Roosevelt’s habit of thinking out loud so disastrously demonstrated;
since it led Eden to devote himself over the next three months to the
chimera of joint Anglo-American action against Japan. His failure did
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much to discredit his policy and to confirm Chamberlain in his search for
bilateral agreements with Germany and Italy for the removal of their
‘legitimate’ grievances.
The American delegation arrived at Brussels without any plan of action
save that of inviting Japan to attend the conference. The smaller powers
at once made clear their determination to avoid any scheme for economic
sanctions against Japan. And, when Japan’s refusal to send a delegation to
Brussels became clear, the American delegation’s attempt to discuss
co-operation with Britain and France, both of whom wanted united action
against Japan, was angrily repudiated by the State Department and
Roosevelt in their anxiety that the United States would be manoeuvred
into being either the spearhead of action or the scapegoat for inaction.
The conference therefore adjourned on 24 November after issuing a
communique in which only Hull could find any satisfaction.
In the meantime the military situation in China had deteriorated very
markedly. In September and again early in November the Japanese
government had offered Chiang Kai-Shek through German good offices
terms which would have confirmed Chinese government in north China
and withdrawn the Japanese forces from north China in return for an end
of anti-Japanese activity in China, a common Sino-Japanese front against
Communism and the re-establishment of de facto relations between China
and Manchukuo. But, just as a desire to forestall any positive action by the
League or the Brussels conference played its part in inspiring the com-
parative moderation of those terms, so the false hopes these aroused in the
Chinese made them unacceptable. In the first week of December, Japanese
troops entered Nanking and by the end of the year virtually the whole of
China’s coast line lay under Japanese control. The collapse of her hopes of
Brussels now led China to indicate her willingness to accept Japan’s terms
at precisely the moment when their military victories had enabled the
hotheads of the Japanese army to overcome the civilian Cabinet’s pre-
dilection for negotiations. On 14 January 1938 the Japanese broke off all
negotiations and all relations with the Chiang government and announced
their intention of moving towards the setting-up of a new Chinese govern-
ment with which it could collaborate.
Their action coincided with the temporary abandonment by the British
government of any attempt to enlist American support against Japan.
On 27 November and again on 13 December, after Japanese aircraft had
sunk the U.S.S. Panay, an American gunboat on the Yangtse-Kiang, and
attacked H.M.S. Ladybird, a British gunboat which was accompanying
her, the British had proposed a joint Anglo-American naval demonstra-
tion, only to be rebuffed. The full news of the Panay incident which
reached Washington only after the rebuff of the second British approach
led some elements in Roosevelt’s administration, notably Henry Morgen-
thau, the Secretary of the Treasury, to propose joint Anglo-American
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economic action; but the British in their turn refused to accept anything
except political and military agreement. In January 1938 an American
naval officer, Captain Ingersoll, visited London and concluded an
‘informal agreement’ on the course to be followed should Britain and
America be involved in war with Japan. But the plan was so tentative and
long term that the British authorities in fact dropped a third proposal for
joint action to prevent Japan taking over the administration of the
Chinese Maritime Customs, preferring to negotiate directly with Japan
on a bilateral basis instead.
In Washington, the continuing debate on how best to oppose Japan led
Roosevelt on 11 January 1938 to address a message to London proposing
that he should call an international conference to reach agreement on the
essential principles to be observed in the conduct of international relations,
including reduction of armaments, equal access to raw materials and the
laws of war. The proposal struck Neville Chamberlain, temporarily in
control of the British Foreign Office in Eden’s absence on holiday, as both
unreal and likely to interfere with the progress of his negotiations for the
appeasement of Germany and Italy. Eden’s belated opposition secured a
withdrawal of his original reply requesting Roosevelt to stay his hand. But
Roosevelt by now had had second thoughts, prompted by Chamberlain’s
indication that de jure recognition of the Italian conquest of Abyssinia
was under consideration, and did not return to the charge. Eden’s
position was the more weakened and Chamberlain’s the more confirmed
in his drive for a settlement with the dictators.
This drive had only been reinforced by events in the Far East, and by
the outcome of the long examination of Britain’s rearmament effort which
was concluded early in 1938. The ever-increasing costs even of those
measures which were already agreed on had led the British Cabinet at the
end of 1937 to limit Britain’s defence effort only to the defence of British
territory at home and overseas and the protection of her trade routes,
leaving co-operation in the defence of the territory of her allies as some-
thing probably beyond Britain’s financial strength. This decision was
reinforced by the categorical statement by the British Chiefs of Staff,
reiterated early in February 1938, that Britain’s forces could not face a
major war in 1938 and were inadequate to meet her existing defence
commitments. It was essential therefore to explore every means of reducing
the number of Britain’s potential enemies.
By the autumn of 1937 Chamberlain himself seemed to have become
increasingly discontented with the slow tempo of the Foreign Office’s
approaches to Germany and Italy, as with the ease with which events in
Spain or the Mediterranean had been allowed to disrupt the approaches
planned to Germany in June 1937 and to Italy in July and October. Eden’s
emphasis on the need to move pari passu with the French he found
equally burdensome. German propaganda for a return of her colonies had
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awakened yet again the idea of legitimising Germany’s demands as part of
a general settlement which had so weakened Britain’s policy towards
Germany after her withdrawal from the League of Nations and in the
months preceding the reoccupation of the Rhineland. A German invita-
tion to Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s closest associate in the Cabinet,
issued in October 1937 was eagerly seized on. Halifax visited Berlin and
Berchtesgaden in November 1937, holding a long conversation with
Hitler in which he outlined Britain’s willingness to support a change in
the status quo in central Europe providing this was achieved without the
use of force. The German failure to react to this move left Chamberlain
only the more convinced of the need to pursue the matter more actively.
The British move was the more important in that, by the end of 1937, no
French government had any alternative, short of an outright surrender to
Germany, of following wherever Britain led. If Britain was on the whole
isolationist where central European affairs were concerned, and beguiled
by the prospect of a settlement, France was so bitterly divided that an
independent anti-German policy was almost inconceivable. If Britain’s
rearmament effort was flagging, and the Treasury determined not to
allow it to weaken her financial recovery, the French effort was pitiable,
hamstrung by trade union agitation for better working conditions, and
the French franc was in a state of almost continuous decline. Chautemps
and Delbos, who came to London at the end of November 1937 for talks
with Chamberlain and Eden, viewed Chamberlain’s policy with scep-
ticism shading into outright distrust. But they were unable to gainsay his
proposals. And Delbos’s subsequent tour of France’s allies in eastern
Europe only underlined the total isolation of Czechoslovakia from Poland
as from her former associates in the Little Entente. This isolation was
underlined in January 1938 by Molotov’s bitter criticism of France in the
final session of the Supreme Soviet, and by the Soviet closure of all but a
handful of the foreign consulates in Russia, steps which underlined
Russia’s retreat into a new isolationism.
Hitler’s uncanny gift for sensing the weaknesses of his opponents had
already shown him the way ahead (ch. xvi). On 5 November 1937 he had
used the occasion of a meeting of his senior service commanders, osten-
sibly called to settle the disputed question of priorities in German steel
production, to outline his readiness, so soon as international conditions
permitted, to strike at Austria and Czechoslovakia. A Franco-Italian war
in the Mediterranean or the spread of civil war to France seemed the most
likely alternatives. Otherwise he was prepared to wait until Germany’s
armament drive had sufficiently outdistanced those of Britain and France,
whom he characterised as hate-crazed opponents of Germany. Halifax’s
offer to help him to meet his demands in central Europe as a kind of
silver medal for good behaviour he did not find attractive. In December
1937 the standing orders for the German armed forces were revised so as
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to put the main planning emphasis on war with France and Czecho-
slovakia, with the main German drive against the Czech defences. And
early in February 1938 he reorganised the command structure of the
armed forces so as to put the main command in his own hands. The
Defence Minister and the Chief of Staff were forced out of office. Baron
von Neurath, the Foreign Minister, was elevated to the chairmanship of a
Reich Council that was never to meet, and his creature, von Ribbentrop,
rescued from the failure of his embassy in London, was made head of a
thoroughly purged Foreign Ministry. Yet as so often in these years
Hitler’s own actions precipitated events and brought upon him the crises
he sought in a manner quite unlike that he had planned for.
The first crisis burst over Austria just as his purge was being completed.
It arose originally from the resentment of the Austrian Nazi party at the
manner in which, since the Austro-German agreement of 1936, it had
been neglected by Germany in favour of the policy recommended by von
Papen of working to infiltrate into the Austrian government representatives
of the much more respectable crypto-Nazi ‘ National Opposition ’. This
resentment led to a plot for a new coup d'etat against the Austrian
government, the plans for which fell into the hands of the Austrian police
when the party offices in Vienna were raided on 22 January 1938. This
capture gave Schuschnigg the confidence to accept the invitation to meet
Hitler which von Papen had so long been pressing on him. And it was his
acceptance in turn which enabled von Papen to escape Hitler’s purge and
fix 12 February as the date for the meeting. Schuschnigg’s hope was that
he could also reach a settlement with the ‘ National Opposition ’ before that
date; but, failing to realise that they were hand-in-glove with Berlin, he
failed to realise that he was destroying any chance of his resisting Hitler’s
pressure in advance.
At his meeting at Berchtesgaden on 12 February he found himself con-
fronted with demands much greater than he was prepared to concede, to
be met within a week, and confronted too with a great parade of military
force. Back in Vienna he seems to have decided that his only chance of
resistance was a carefully prepared nation-wide plebiscite in favour of
Austrian independence. No support was likely from Britain or France;
and Italy, while prepared to use the crisis to force Britain to negotiate
with her on a Mediterranean settlement, was not prepared to support
Austria against Germany. Chamberlain forced Eden’s resignation on the
issue of opening negotiations with Italy after a meeting with Grandi, the
Italian ambassador in London, on 19 February. But, when news of
Schuschnigg’s intention leaked out on 8 March, Mussolini advised him
against it.
Schuschnigg’s plan threatened the downfall of Hitler’s whole Austrian
policy. On 10 March therefore he ordered military preparations for the
immediate invasion of Austria and demanded the cancellation of the
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plebiscite. This granted, on n March, he followed it by demanding
Schuschnigg’s resignation and his replacement by the leader of the
‘National Opposition’, the German stooge, Artur Seyss-Inquart. Actual
invasion by German troops was as unwelcome to Seyss-Inquart as it was
to the Austrian Nazis and the Austrian government. But the refusal of the
Austrian President to appoint Seyss-Inquart and Hitler’s discovery that
Italy would not intervene cleared the way for direct invasion. On 12 March
German troops crossed the frontier. The next day in his old home town of
Linz Hitler proclaimed the union of Austria with Germany.
The successful annexation of Austria marks the opening of a new and
much more reckless phase in Hitler’s foreign policy, and one in which
international events were to be wholly dominated by his actions (ch. xvi).
Strategically it turned the flank of the Czech fortress system, leaving all
Bohemia thrust like a peninsula into German-controlled territory. Al-
most unanimously, Europe’s governments assumed that Hitler’s next
target would be the union of the three million Sudeten Germans into his
Reich. That this was for him only a preliminary, or rather an excuse for
the destruction and absorption of the Czech state, they were not yet ready
to believe. The slogan of self-determination and revision of Versailles
blinded them to Hitler’s real aims as to his hatred of the Czechs and
their state.
The origins of the Sudeten German problem went back to the rise of
Czech nationalism in the nineteenth century and its national identification
with the old crownlands of the Habsburg empire, Bohemia and Moravia.
In 1918 the Sudeten Germans had proclaimed their union with Germany,
only to find their movement suppressed by Czech military action and
themselves incorporated into the new Czechoslovak state by the Treaty of
Versailles. During the 1920s the main political parties among the
Sudeten Germans had collaborated with the Czech state, entering into
the Agrarian Coalition government in 1926. Only the extreme nationalists,
among whom a small Nazi party was to be found, had opposed them.
Economic grievances in the years of the world economic depression and
the rise to power of Hitler in Germany led in 1933 to so great an accretion
of Nazi strength that the party was dissolved by Czech police action. The
German Foreign Ministry took the opportunity to encourage the emerg-
ence of a new political movement under a young youth leader, Konrad
Henlein. With secret financial support from the ministry his party, the
Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), won 44 out of the 66 German seats in the
Czech elections of April 1935, making them the second largest party in
the Czech parliament. Thereafter Henlein had concentrated on winning
sympathy abroad, especially in Britain, for his party and claims against
the Czech state; in which he had been remarkably successful. The flat
contradiction between the forcible incorporation of three million Germans
into Czechoslovakia and the slogan of national self-determination had
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always pricked the Anglo-Saxon conscience; and the slavishness with
which Czechoslovakia had followed the French line at the League of
Nations in the 1920s had not won her any goodwill in British government
circles. Already in November 1937, Chamberlain had made it clear to
Chautemps and Delbos that British opinion would not support involve-
ment in a war with Germany over Czechoslovakia.
The Anschluss was therefore followed immediately by discussions both
in London and in Paris on the Czechoslovak question. In Paris, a new
government headed by Blum, but retaining Delbos as Foreign Secretary,
took office on 13 March. On 15 March, at a meeting of the Comite de la
Defense Nationale, they heard General Gamelin tell them that the French
army was unready for war, and that the prospects of its being able to help
Czech resistance against a German attack were viewed very pessimistically.
Blum and Delbos refused to accept this; but renewed diplomatic sound-
ings in eastern Europe revealed Czechoslovakia still to be totally isolated.
On 8 April the Blum government fell. Edouard Daladier, a man of more
rhetoric than understanding or determination, became Premier, Georges
Bonnet, a devious and pacific-minded schemer, Foreign Minister.
In London the Chiefs of Staff were, if anything, more pessimistic.
Britain, they advised, could not prevent Germany overrunning Czecho-
slovakia. To enter a war with Germany would be to embark on a long
struggle in which Italy and Japan could be expected to intervene at their
own chosen moment. They could not foresee a time when, even with the
aid of France and her allies, Britain could withstand such a triple attack.
In 1938 Britain was definitely not ready for war, and to embark on war
would entail a grave risk of defeat. Their advice reinforced the Prime
Minister in his belief that resisting German pressure on Czechoslovakia
was no responsibility of Britain. And on such a weak military hand he
was not inclined to bluff. In his speech to Parliament on 24 March 1938,
which was to become the sacred text of British policy, he said that the
Sudeten question was one internal to Czechoslovakia, and should be
settled at that level. Britain had no obligations to Czechoslovakia other
than those contained in the Covenant of the League. He warned Germany
that, if war should break out, it was unlikely that it would be confined to
central Europe. Privately, it was agreed that any obvious anti-German
front must be avoided, and pressure brought upon Prague to meet the
Sudeten demands, and upon Paris to influence Prague in the same sense.
In Moscow the main anxiety appears to have been to counter the
appeasement policy of Britain and France and embroil them with
Germany while avoiding anything likely to involve them in a direct clash
with Germany. On 17 March Litvinov did his best, via the foreign press
correspondents, to urge common resistance to Germany. But the Soviet
Union’s own obligations to Czechoslovakia only became operative if
France first honoured hers. Soviet troops could only come to Prague’s aid
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by crossing the territory of Poland or Rumania, both adamantly opposed
to the entry of Soviet troops into their countries. Moscow left to Paris the
task of persuading them to alter their stand. Litvinov further proposed a
conference of Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, the United States and the
Soviet Union. The rejection of his proposal by Britain, France and
America only underlined the exclusion of the Soviet Union from European
politics for the next twelve months.
The preoccupation shared by London, Paris and Moscow with the
prospect of a German move against Czechoslovakia was justified by
Hitler’s own moves. On 28 March he told the SdP leaders that it was his
intention to ‘solve the Czech problem in the not too distant future’, and
instructed them to advance demands beyond those the Prague government
could be expected to concede. Thus, when the Czech government, under
Anglo-French prompting, opened negotiations with Henlein, they were
confronted with eight demands, advanced in his speech of 23 April at the
SdP Conference held in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), which would have
made the Sudeten territories virtually autonomous within the Czech state.
In the meantime, Hitler had ordered his armed forces to redraft the
standing orders of December 1937 to comprehend the changed strategic
situation after the annexation of Austria. And on 5-8 May he visited
Italy and offered Mussolini a direct military alliance.
This offer Mussolini refused. Despite his acquiescence in the annexation
of Austria, he had been alarmed by the arrival of German troops on the
Brenner. Extremist Nazi propaganda in the South Tyrol and German
activities in Jugoslavia had further irritated him. On 18 April he had
finally succeeded in negotiating an agreement on the Mediterranean and
Middle East with Britain by which Britain at last promised to recognise
Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia in return for a cessation of Italian pressure
in Libya and the Middle East, and a withdrawal of Italian volunteers
from Spain. As Hitler arrived in Rome, negotiations for a similar agree-
ment with France were in progress. Hitler returned to Germany disillu-
sioned and empty-handed. Five days later the Franco-Italian negotiations
broke down and Mussolini attempted to return to the German offer, only
to find that Hitler had had second thoughts. Their occasion was the
so-called ‘week-end’ crisis of 20-22 May.
The crisis was occasioned by the association of reports of heavy
German troop movements towards the Czech frontier with a break in
Sudeten German contacts with the Czech government on the eve of the
Czech local elections. On 20 May these reports led the Czech government,
under pressure from its military advisers, to call a general mobilisation
(the reports were ominously similar to those which had preluded the
occupation of Austria), to call one class of reservists and various special-
ists, in all about 50,000 men, to the colours. British enquiries in Berlin
the same day were met with indignant denials that any untoward troop
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movements were in fact in progress; and investigations by the British
military attache and his staff failed to disclose anything on the scale
reported. The British and French governments however made warning
demarches in Berlin on 21 May, the British following this with a special
appeal by Halifax to Ribbentrop the following day. The German denials
were widely hailed in the Western press as a major defeat for Hitler.
Hitler had, in fact, not yet decided on the timing of his next moves on
Czechoslovakia. When the crisis opened he was considering the draft
orders designed to put the Wehrmacht in a state of readiness to act against
Czechoslovakia when he felt the political moment warranted it. The
Anglo-French action and the comments of the Western press on these
seem to have acted on his unstable personality like a red rag to a bull. On
24 May he ordered his naval staff to draw up plans for an immense increase
in naval strength, as Britain and France were now to be considered as
Germany’s bitterest enemies. On 30 May he announced his intention of
crushing Czechoslovakia at the first available opportunity. The Wehr-
macht were to be prepared for action by 1 October. The opportunity was
to be created by the political leadership working through the Sudeten
leader, Henlein.
In London and Paris the effect of the ‘week-end’ crisis seems to have
been to determine both governments not to allow any repetition. Pressure
on the Czechs to reach an accommodation with the Sudetens was greatly
increased. Neither government seems to have been aware of Henlein’s
German direction; which made any idea of a compromise being found
completely impossible. Renewed negotiations between the Czechs and
the Sudeten leadership, in fact, took place in the first week of June, and
the Czechs went a very considerable way to meet the Sudeten demands.
True to his instructions from Hitler, however, Henlein found grounds for
rejecting them; and the Czech leadership on their side had a good deal of
resistance to overcome within the governing coalition.
The failure of these negotiations led the British to turn to the idea of
sending a mediator to attempt to evolve a compromise acceptable to both
sides. The proposal was discussed in Paris on 20 July between Lord
Halifax, who, as Foreign Secretary, accompanied King George VI on his
state visit to Paris, and Bonnet. Initial Czech resistance to the idea was
abandoned after Britain and France had threatened to abandon Czecho-
slovakia to her fate in the event of a German-Czech war. The chosen
negotiator, the former Cabinet minister, Lord Runciman, arrived in
Czechoslovakia on 3 August. With this action the British government,
despite their professed lack of interest in central Europe, assumed an
open responsibility for the solution of the Sudeten dispute and the
protection of Czechoslovakia, which it was to prove impossible to evade.
During the month of August it became clear, despite Lord Runciman’s
mission, that a Sudeten settlement was in fact impossible. The Sudetens
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duly rejected a third set of proposals submitted to them on 2 September
by the Czech authorities. In desperation the Czech President forced on his
Cabinet the total acceptance of Henlein’s Karlsbad programme. This was
duly announced to the startled Sudeten negotiators on 6 September. But
the approach of 1 October and the opening of the Nazi party rally in
Nuremberg in the first week of September had already made all this out of
date.
The critical event was Hitler’s speech to the party rally on 1 2 September.
But during August the German propaganda build-up had been such as to
convince world opinion that a German declaration of war might be
expected to coincide with the rally. Once again Hitler’s political and
psychological warfare got ahead of his military timetable. On 27 August
the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, repeated the
warning contained in Chamberlain’s speech of 24 March. But Chamberlain
was already turning his thoughts to a further move.
The increasing pressure was used as an occasion for a renewed Russian
intervention. Since the Sudeten crisis opened Soviet diplomacy had been
devoted to attempting to stiffen Czech resistance to Germany and to
incite Britain and France to join in a ‘grand alliance’ against aggression.
Questions as to how the Soviet Union could help Czechoslovakia were
answered by animadversion to Polish and Rumanian unwillingness to
allow transit or overflying rights to Soviet troops. The offer of a grand
alliance was made twice, over the period 17-22 March, and again in talks
between Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and Bonnet on 12 May in
Geneva. From that date until the end of August, the Soviet authorities
made no new move except to repeat assurances that they would honour
their obligations to Czechoslovakia.
The apparent imminence of a German attack on Czechoslovakia now
drove Litvinov to one final attempt to secure a common front against
Hitler. On 26 August the Soviet Ambassador in Paris urged Bonnet to
show more firmness in the Czech question. On 2 September Litvinov
answered French queries as to how the Soviet Union proposed to aid
Czechoslovakia in the light of Poland and Rumania’s attitude to the
transit problem by proposing the employment of the machinery of the
League of Nations and asking for immediate staff talks. On 10-12 Sep-
tember Litvinov followed this with talks in Geneva with Comn£ne, the
Rumanian Foreign Minister, and Bonnet. Comnene remained opposed to
all talk of Soviet troops passing through Rumania. Bonnet evaded
Litvinov’s pressure for staff talks, pleading British resistance, and ignored
his renewed appeal to activate the League machinery. Both Bonnet and
Chamberlain preferred to exclude the Soviet Union from their designs,
suspecting a Soviet scheme to involve them in war with Germany. The
Soviets on their side were still unprepared to act except within the frame-
work of their alliance with Czechoslovakia, that is, in the case of prior
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French support of Czechoslovakia, and with the backing of the League of
Nations to justify the passage of their troops through Rumania.
Hitler’s speech was delivered on 12 September. It was preceded on
7 September by an incident in the Sudetenland in which two Sudeten
Germans were killed by a Czech gendarme, an incident which gave the
Sudeten leadership the excuse needed to enable them to evade discussion
of the latest Czech proposals. Hitler’s speech was venomous and bellicose;
and was followed immediately by aa outbreak of disorders staged by
extremists of the SdP which in places, especially in the Egerland, reached
the scale of open rebellion. The Czechs retaliated by proclaiming emer-
gency law and moving troops and police into the affected areas in force.
The SdP leadership and the bulk of the SdP storm-troops took refuge in
Germany, and the SdP itself was proscribed. For the moment there was
even a movement among former SdP moderates to form a new party to
resume negotiations with the Czech authorities.
Hitler's speech and the subsequent disorders in the Sudetenland caused
panic in Paris and led Chamberlain to embark on his plan, pondered
since the end of August, of a direct meeting with Hitler. At Berchtesgaden
on 15 September Hitler demanded from Chamberlain the secession of the
Sudetenland to Germany, and the detachment of Czechoslovakia’s
Hungarian and Polish minorities. On Chamberlain’s pressure, he agreed,
however, to discern ways and means of implementing ‘self-determination’
if Britain would accept the principle. Returning to London on 16 Sep-
tember, Chamberlain persuaded his Cabinet to accept the secession of the
Sudetenland to Germany and the issue of a guarantee to the remainder
of the Czechoslovak state. Cession seemed preferable to a plebiscite as
demanded, inter alios, by Mussolini, which the Czechs themselves turned
down completely. On 18 September, meeting under the prospect of
immediate Czech mobilisation, Chamberlain persuaded the French
ministers Daladier and Bonnet to accept the principle of cession of all
districts with a German majority and an exchange of populations in other
areas. Joint Anglo-French proposals in this sense were submitted to
President Benes the following day. In the early hours of 21 September the
Czech Cabinet finally accepted these proposals after their initial rejection
of them had been met with a flat statement by the British and French
ministers in Prague that this would involve immediate German invasion
and the repudiation of the French alliance. Before accepting the Anglo-
French proposals Benes enquired what the Soviet attitude would be in
the event of France not honouring her obligations to Czechoslovakia.
The Russian answers were too hesitant and too equivocal, being linked
with a Czech appeal to the League of Nations, to overcome BeneS’s
reluctance to break with the West and give substance to German allega-
tions that Czechoslovakia was merely a tool of Bolshevism.
On 22 September therefore Chamberlain met Hitler at Godesberg with
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the news of Czech acceptance of his Berchtesgaden proposals. He was
flabbergasted to be met by a flat statement that this was no longer enough.
In the first place there were the demands of Poland and Hungary. In the
second place Czech troops and police must be withdrawn from the areas
inside the German language frontier by I October at the latest. Chamber-
lain then broke off negotiations, and there followed an exchange of letters
in which Hitler reiterated his demands. On the evening of 23 September at
a second conversation Hitler handed over a map showing the areas im-
mediately to be evacuated by Czech troops and further areas in which a
plebiscite was to be held on the basis of residence before October 1918,
that is, before the establishment of the Czechoslovak state. Chamberlain
extracted a slight extension of the time limit for evacuation from Hitler
and returned to London. Before the second meeting with Hitler, he had
already agreed to withdraw British objections to Czech mobilisation
(partial French mobilisation followed the same evening). He also agreed,
however, to transmit these new German proposals to the Czechs; whose
note rejecting them in toto, but agreeing to treat with the Poles, was
received in London on 25 September.
Both French and British Cabinets agreed on rejecting the Godesberg
proposals. On 25 September Bonnet and Daladier flew again to London
to concoct the next step. The conference stretched into the following day.
Under brutal and persistent questioning into the reality of France’s
ability to conduct war, Daladier accepted on 26 September a British
proposal that a new appeal should be addressed to Hitler, which should
include a warning that, if France went to war with Germany as a result of a
German attack on Czechoslovakia, Britain would support her. The appeal
reached Hitler before, but did not prevent, his delivery of a violent and
bellicose speech at the Berlin Sportpalast demanding total evacuation of
the Sudetenland by 1 October or war. The appeal was delivered by Sir
Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s agent; he did not give Hitler the accom-
panying warning until the following morning.
It is from this date that Hitler seems to have lost some of his determina-
tion on war. Orders to mobilise were issued that day (27 September) but
in secret. A contributory factor may have been the marked lack of
enthusiasm shown by the population of Germany in general and Berlin
in particular to the military demonstration he staged in Berlin that
evening. A British declaration, based on a conversation in Geneva with
Litvinov on 24 September, that the Soviet Union would also support
France cannot but have added to his uneasiness.
That evening, however, the British evolved a further set of proposals
providing for a tripartite German-Czech-British conference to arrange
for Czech evacuation of the Sudetenland, drawing up of a new frontier,
and the future revision of Czechoslovakia’s treaty relationships. Simul-
taneously Chamberlain made a radio appeal for peace in which he spoke
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of a ‘quarrel in a faraway country among people of which we know
nothing’, and spoke of continuing efforts for peace. On 28 September
Chamberlain delivered a fresh appeal to Hitler, accompanying it with a
simultaneous appeal to Mussolini. He offered to come to Germany for a
new four power conference to settle all Germany’s essential demands.
Before the appeal was delivered to Hitler, Mussolini intervened also to
suggest the postponement of German mobilisation in terms which sug-
gested that Italy’s previous readiness to support Hitler (staff conversations
between the German and Italian armed forces were just about to begin)
was about to disappear. He followed this with a second message suggesting
a four power conference. This Hitler had no real choice but to accept.
The conference met in Munich in the afternoon of 29 September.
Hitler saw Mussolini, who already knew the German proposals, first.
At the conference Mussolini advanced the German proposals as though
they were his own. No forceful objections being made to his draft by
either Chamberlain or Daladier, the final draft of the agreement was
signed shortly after midnight the same day. It provided for the cession of
the entire Sudeten territory to Germany, its evacuation by Czech troops
and officials to begin on 1 October and be completed by 10 October
under the supervision of a five power Commission (the four signatories
and Czechoslovakia). Certain disputed areas were to be the subject of
plebiscites. Britain and France would guarantee the new boundaries
against unprovoked aggression, Germany and Italy following suit when
the Polish and Hungarian claims had been settled. Only when the agree-
ment had been signed was it presented to the Czechs.
The Czech government found itself faced with the alternative of fighting
Germany on her own or capitulating. Against Germany her forces were
approximately equal, save in the air; moreover they lay behind long-pre-
pared fortifications. But the prospects of Hungary and Poland joining in
made things very different. They addressed one last appeal to the Soviets;
but were forced to decide on the proposals before a Soviet reply could be
received. To preserve Czechoslovakia from war they accepted the pro-
posals, which stripped them of all their fortifications and left them
defenceless.
On 30 September Chamberlain met Hitler briefly and secured his
signature to a hastily prepared Anglo-German declaration, drafted by
Chamberlain’s staff on his instructions, binding Hitler to settle ‘any other
questions that may concern our two countries’ by consultation. On this
document he was to build short-lived hopes of a new settlement in
Europe, the aim towards which he had been working since the summer of
1937. With this his own personal triumph was complete, as much with
the German people as with those of France and Britain.
Yet the Munich settlement in fact represented a total defeat for that
policy. It destroyed the remains of the Versailles balance. It left all
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eastern and south-eastern Europe open to German colonisation. It greatly
weighted the military balance towards Germany not only by handing over
the equipment of the Czech army and ending the threat to Germany’s
south-eastern frontiers, but also by putting under German control the
whole Skoda industrial armaments complex. Finally it enlisted both Hun-
gary and Poland firmly on Germany’s side.
The Polish government had nursed the issue of Teschen to divide
them from Czechoslovakia since 1919. From 1933 onwards they had
attempted to play the role of a great power in central Europe, a role which
led in 1937 to Colonel Beck enunciating the doctrine of the intermarium, a
zone stretching from Scandinavia to Italy and the Balkans, to be led by
Poland in agreement with Italy. To this Czechoslovakia was the principal
obstacle, rendered more hateful by her Soviet connections. Indeed,
continuing hostility to the Soviet Union was one of the main elements in
Beck’s policy of balance at this time, and there were some Polish-Japanese
contacts, designed by Beck to reinforce the anti-Soviet elements in
Japanese policy. In conversations with Admiral Horthy in February 1938
and Count Ciano in March and in visits to the principal Baltic and
Scandinavian capitals in the summer of 1938, Beck had alternately dis-
cussed the need for a common Polono-Hungarian frontier and adum-
brated the idea of the intermarium as a block to further German expansion.
With the intensification of the Czech crisis in August 1938 Polish demands
had been advanced ‘ in steps ’ as Beck put it on 8 September with Germany.
On 20 September a formal claim was made on Teschen and Polish military
preparations began, only to be brought to a complete halt on 27 September
by a Soviet warning and ominous Soviet troop concentrations on the
eastern frontier. On 25 September when Czech rejection of the Godesberg
terms made war seem inevitable, the Czechs offered to cede Teschen to
Poland to buy security for their northern flank. Munich, however, said
nothing of Poland’s claims.
Hungary by contrast now followed a more cautious path, driven by
anxiety as to the possible attitude of Czechoslovakia’s associates in the
Little Entente, Jugoslavia and Rumania. In April her demands for staff
talks with Germany were ignored, so that later pressure by Goering in
June and July on Sztojay, the Hungarian minister in Berlin, and on
Horthy himself on his visit to Berlin at the end of August, was no more
successful. Nor could the Hungarians extract guarantees from Rome. Both
Germany and Italy set too much store on the pro- Axis course followed by
Stoyadinovic, the Jugoslav Premier. Instead Hungary felt constrained to
negotiate an agreement with the Little Entente powers, signed at Bled on
28 August. This did not prevent the Hungarians from advancing the
claims of their own minority in Czechoslovakia on 22 September. But
it prevented any of the powers meeting at Munich from taking them any
more seriously than those of the Poles.
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In the discussion of 30 September between Chamberlain and Hitler,
reference was made by Hitler to the Spanish civil war and to the Sino-
Japanese conflict. The Spanish civil war had, in fact, lost a good deal of its
central position in international affairs as a result of the new German
drive in central Europe and the collapse of the Spanish Republican front in
the north in April 1938. For a time it seemed as if German and Italian
forces would no longer be needed ; but the reopening of the French frontier
for arms deliveries to the Republicans thereafter and a great flood of
Soviet aid led to the re-establishment of the military stalemate. The
German and Italian governments decided reluctantly to continue to
maintain their forces on Franco’s side, and there was a recrudescence,
largely ignored in the tensions of the Czech crisis, of air and submarine
attacks on British ships trading with the remaining ports in Republican
control. The sharpening of the Czech crisis in August and early September
was viewed with great alarm by the nationalist authorities, who feared that
they would be the first object of French attack in the event of a Franco-
German conflict. Franco in fact declared his unconditional neutrality at
the height of the September crisis, greatly to the disgust of the Axis
leaders. In November 1938, however, he was again the beneficiary of
large-scale German aid. Simultaneously, the Soviet authorities seem to
have abandoned any hope of widening the Spanish conflict so as to in-
volve the West with Franco’s Axis supporters. The international brigades
were withdrawn the same month, and the collapse of the Republican
forces in Catalonia and in central Spain followed in March 1939. On
27 February 1939 Britain and France formally recognised the Franco
regime.
In the Far East the principal developments in 1938 followed the same
indecisive pattern as in the previous year. China leaned heavily on Soviet
aid; this did not, however, prevent new Sino-Japanese talks on a settle-
ment in the summer of 1938 which broke on Japanese intransigence. The
Japanese army, obsessed by the need to discourage Soviet aid, opened
contacts in January 1938 with Ribbentrop, through the Japanese military
attach^ in Berlin, General Oshima, on transforming the Anti-Comintern
Pact into a military alliance. In July 1938 German aid to China was
finally cut off and the German military advisers recalled. At the same time
draft German proposals were sent to Tokyo by a special Japanese
emissary. The Japanese authorities decided to take them up, but on two
conditions: that the alliance should be principally directed against the
Soviet Union, and that the treaty should be defensive. The collapse of the
Sino-Japanese talks was followed by a marked hardening of the Japanese
attitude as the Ugaki Cabinet was replaced in September by one headed
by Prince Konoye; and Japanese military action was now devoted to
gaining control of the whole Chinese coast line. Canton and Hankow
fell to Japanese attack that month. In August bitter fighting on the
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Soviet-Manchurian border at Chang Ku-feng between Soviet and
Japanese forces showed that, despite the spread of the Stalinist purge
to the Soviet Far Eastern forces (their commander, Marshal Blyukher,
was executed in November 1938), they could still give a very good account
of themselves.
The Munich agreement gave Hitler the command of eastern Europe;
but it preserved the rump of the Czech state he had determined to smash.
It opened the way for him to move either eastwards or westwards,
either against the Ukraine and the Soviet Union, or against France and
Britain. Although there seem to have been those in his entourage, notably
Goering and Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, who wanted to move
eastwards, the course and outcome of the Czech crisis, whose resolution
had given not Hitler but Chamberlain the plaudits both of the world and
of the German crowds, seem to have settled Hitler in favour of making his
next great move against France and Britain. First, however, he had some
unfinished business: rump-Czechoslovakia had to fall, the German flag
to wave over Prague. Then there was the Memel. And finally there were
Danzig, the Corridor and Poland. That, for Hitler, these were only side-
shows is shown by the drive he put into negotiations to transform the
Anti-Comintern Pact into a triple alliance against the West, by the
lengths he went to to negotiate a settlement with Poland, by the priority
he gave to building up the German navy and by the orders he issued for
staff talks with Italy.
His grand design was, however, more grandiose than well designed. In
the first place he had to re-establish his control over Poland and Hungary,
both eager to establish a common frontier across Slovakia and Ruthenia.
The task, complicated by his failure to understand for a month or so the
strength of Slovak separatism, and Goering’s encouragement of the
Ukrainian nationalists of Ruthenia, was only achieved with Italian aid,
and the severest pressure on Budapest. By the Vienna award of 2 November
1938 Hungarian frontier claims against Slovakia were settled, and the
Hungarians induced to demobilise. German economic courtship of
Rumania was increased, and the Slovaks shown they could rely on
German protection. Support for the Ruthenes was thereafter withdrawn.
On 21 October and 17 December directives prepared the Reichswehr
for the march into Prague. The new Czech government attempted to
appease Berlin, but in vain. Early in February 1939 the Slovaks were
incited to press for independence from Prague. Negotiations between
Czechs and Slovaks broke down on 10 March. Summoned to Berlin and
given the go-ahead on 13 March, the Slovak leader, Tiso, proclaimed
Slovakia’s independence the following day. The Ruthenes followed suit.
That same evening, the Czech President, Hacha, also summoned to
Berlin, was bullied into requesting a German protectorate. At 6 a.m. on
15 March German troops entered Bohemia and Moravia. The protectorate
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was proclaimed the following day. Hungarian troops engulfed the un-
fortunate Ruthenes. Czechoslovakia was no more.
This was the littlest part of the grand design, and the only part to go
right. Its very success upset everything else; but the other parts of the
design had already run into trouble. An indispensable part was settlement
of Danzig and the Corridor (chs. ix, xvi). Hitler and Ribbentrop spent
five months trying to persuade the Poles to accept their offer, compensa-
tion in the Ukraine for the reversion of Danzig to Germany, and the
grant to Germany of sovereignty over a six-lane autobahn through the
Corridor. Invited to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, the Poles rightly saw
this as an invitation to accept satellite status, without realising that the
balance of power had swung irretrievably against any chance of then-
maintaining a position of true independence. The Germans urged the
generosity of their offer at Berchtesgaden on 24 October 1938 to Lipsky,
the Polish Ambassador; in Berlin on 19 November; in Warsaw on
15 December; in Munich on 5 January, when Colonel Beck was Hitler’s
guest; in Warsaw, at the end of January, when Ribbentrop returned the
visit. The Poles temporised, evaded, procrastinated. Instead, on 19 Novem-
ber 1938, they concluded a new agreement with the Soviet Union. And
Colonel Beck dreamed of Polish colonies, to be obtained in the new
colonial carve-up for which he thought Hitler was pressing the British.
In the effort to demonstrate German goodwill Ribbentrop ran relations
with the Soviet Union, with whom new trade talks were due, to a total
standstill; all in vain.
Nor were the negotiations with Japan and Italy any more successful.
The Japanese army and the Konoye Cabinet pressed for a general treaty
which would isolate China and bring the Kuomintang to capitulate; but
it is clear that for them its main weight had to be against Russia. The
Italians were much less sympathetic. Given the first draft during the
Munich conference, Ciano consigned it to the ‘file and forget’ category.
Mussolini was not anxious to jeopardise ratification of the Easter agree-
ments with Britain, and was alarmed by the prospect of being odd man
out in the Berlin-Tokyo relationship. Ribbentrop, descending suddenly
on Rome on 28 October 1938 to obtain signature of the alliance, was
rudely rebuffed. The Anglo-Italian agreement was ratified on 1 6 November.
A fortnight later, on 30 November, the Italian Chamber of Deputies
staged an organised demonstration, calling for the return to Italy of
Corsica, Nice, Savoy, Tunis. The French government reacted toughly.
By 2 January Mussolini, who had already been pressing for German-
Italian staff talks, told the Germans he was ready and willing to sign the
alliance. Four days later the Japanese Cabinet collapsed. In its successor,
headed by Baron Hiranuma, the element of caution was more strongly
entrenched. Successive drafts and counter-drafts were exchanged in vain.
The majority in the Japanese Cabinet would not accept a treaty which
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they could not justify both at home and in London and Washington as
being purely directed against the Soviet Union. British and American
pressure (both countries were well informed on the course of the negotia-
tions despite the secrecy with which they were cloaked) only reinforced
their objections. Ribbentrop insisted on an alliance which would operate
against Britain and distract and dissipate British strength away from
Europe; again, in vain.
In the meantime, German plans for war against Britain were maturing.
On 26 November the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) issued
Hitler’s orders for staff talks with Italy. Their aim was war with Britain
and France, to knock France out by a direct breach of the Maginot line
and to drive British influence finally from the European mainland. In
December the navy’s plan for a fleet to defeat British sea power by a
guerre de course on the surface, the Z-plan, was finally approved. Prepara-
tions to denounce the Anglo-German naval agreement were discussed,
though in the meantime the proprieties were observed. At the end of the
year Anglo-German naval conversations legitimised the growth of the
German submarine fleet to parity with that of the British Commonwealth.
And early in January Hitler signed an order giving the German navy
priority in the allocation of steel and other vital raw materials over the
German army and the Luftwaffe.
A major factor in whipping Hitler on against Britain was the British
reaction to Munich. The settlement itself was acclaimed in London as
opening a new era of Anglo-German relations. But it soon was apparent
that this was not intended to be one in which British armaments would
again be as weak as in September 1938. New measures of rearmament
were announced and set in motion. And, while it was clear that the British
government were prepared to concede German hegemony in central
Europe, it was also clear that elsewhere, including the colonial issue,
their attitude had much hardened. They thus raised no objection to
France negotiating an agreement on the same lines as the Anglo-German
declaration. And such an agreement was in fact signed by Bonnet and
Ribbentrop in Paris on 6 December 1938. But when Chamberlain and
Halifax visited Paris on 24 November they urged the French to escalate
their arms programme. They placed some hopes on a series of economic
negotiations with Germany. But the anti-Jewish pogroms staged in
Germany on 1 0 November so incensed British opinion that, when Chamber-
lain and Halifax visited Rome in January 1939, one of their purposes
seemed to be to appeal to Mussolini to get Hitler to see reason.
At the same time increasing reports were reaching British intelligence
of German plans for new aggressions. In late December these all reported
a new move eastwards. But in January an attack on the Netherlands
or directly, by air-bombardment, on Britain was foreshadowed. On
24 January Halifax alerted Washington and Paris. Early in February, the
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British began to press for staff talks with the French. The French replied
by urging Britain to adopt conscription. In mid-February the Cabinet,
overriding both the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister’s
rearguard action, decided to equip an expeditionary force to fight in
France. It was at this moment that news arrived of the German march into
Prague, over a week-end just after Sir Samuel Hoare had unwisely been
seduced into speaking of the dawning of a golden age of peace.
With the German march into Prague, Hitler destroyed completely any
chance he might have had of completing his grand design against Britain
and France. The ruin of his schemes was, however, not his action in
annexing an immense population of non-Germans into German rule,
though it made any further exploitation of the doctrine of ‘national self-
determination’ and the Western Versailles guilt-complex impossible, while
providing his enemies with a useful counter-argument. It was the atmo-
sphere of war-nerves which the suddenness of his action created in
Europe which was to bring about the defeat of his plans.
The first reaction came on 17 March when the Rumanian minister in
London, M. Tilea, appealed to Britain for aid against alleged German
demands for a monopoly position in Rumanian trade, which, he said,
had the character of an ultimatum. The British reaction was to move at
once to the idea that a settlement with Germany was only possible if
Hitler could be shown that further expansion would involve a European
war. On 18 March therefore enquiries were addressed to all the Balkan
states, to Poland and to the Soviet Union, to ask what their attitude would
be in the event of a Rumanian appeal for aid to resist German aggression.
The move was immediately welcomed by Litvinov, the last embodiment
in the Soviet Union as in Europe of the idea of collective resistance to
Germany. Since the Soviet Union’s exclusion from the Munich conference
his influence in Moscow had been waning, as the Soviet Union retreated
into isolation. In February he had made an abortive attempt to organise a
Black Sea pact which would strengthen Rumania and Turkey against
German pressure. The real trend of Soviet policy had been revealed on
10 March in Stalin’s speech to the eighteenth congress of the Soviet
Communist party, with its celebration of Soviet armed might and its
denunciation of the democracies for their misguided hopes that the Soviet
Union would ‘pull their chestnuts out of the fire’. Since Munich the only
Russian moves of any diplomatic importance had been to conclude the
November 1938 agreement with Poland and to withdraw entirely both
their own advisers and the international brigades from the Spanish
republic, leaving it to its fate.
The British initiative must have come to Litvinov as his last chance.
On 18 March he replied by proposing a conference of the British, French,
Rumanian, Polish, Turkish and Soviet governments to meet immediately
in Bucharest to discuss common action. The proposal struck the British as
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dilatory and verbose. In its stead they proposed a declaration by Britain,
France, Poland and the Soviet Union that they would immediately
consult on joint resistance to any threat to the political independence of
any European state. Litvinov’s proposal was dismissed as ‘premature’.
By 22 March it had become clear that any hope of Poland participating in
a joint declaration or conference with the Soviet Union was illusory.
With this Litvinov's hopes of collective action faded, and the Soviet
authorities seem to have concluded that Britain still had no serious
intentions of standing up to Hitler.
On 21 March Hitler made his last attempt to persuade Poland to join
his camp. The next day his forces marched into the Memel. In reply the
Poles mobilised three age groups, and on 23 March and 28 March
rejected entirely the German proposals on Danzig, stating that any
attempt at unilateral action over Danzig would lead Poland to declare
war. In London alarmist reports of German military moves against
Poland led Chamberlain to act on the proposal for a declaration uni-
laterally. On 31 March he announced to a startled House of Commons
that if Poland felt herself threatened and compelled to resist that threat by
force Britain would come to her aid, a declaration which made Warsaw
formally the arbiter of Britain’s entry into war. This guarantee represented
so extraordinary a move that, although at once accepted by the Poles, it
was not taken seriously either in Berlin or in Moscow. Intended as a
deterrent to Hitler, it remained strictly incredible, since, without an Anglo-
Soviet alliance or Soviet-Polish military co-operation, there was no way of
supporting Poland against German attack. Only the Poles believed they
could stand up to German might.
To the Soviets the British action represented yet a further attempt to
use them only as a backstop for British policy. Presumably to test
British sincerity, they proposed staff talks on 6 April, and on 18 April a
ten-year alliance. At the same time, Soviet diplomatists began to hint in
Berlin that the Soviet Union was interested in improving relations with
Germany. The real Soviet worry, however, seems to have been at the
progress of British policy in the Balkans. Here the British had been very
much aided by local fears of Italy. The German action in Prague had
stung Mussolini to renewed rage. He had long pressed for staff talks with
Germany on common action against the democracies, and early in March
Hitler had agreed to them taking place purely at a technical level. On
5 April these opened in Innsbruck. On 9 April Mussolini’s forces invaded
Albania; as a tit-for-tat for Prague, he gave Germany no more warning
than he had had of the Prague operation.
The Italian action reacted in turn on Britain, whose main diplomatic
effort was now put into the attempt to make Turkey the keystone of a
Balkan bloc guaranteeing Rumania against aggression. British and French
guarantees were given to Rumania on 13 April. Their drive had sufficient
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success for a while to alarm the Soviet authorities. On 22 April
M. Potemkin, the Soviet deputy Foreign Minister, was dispatched on a tour
of the Balkan capitals. But by the time he arrived in Ankara the Soviet
authorities appear to have concluded that Britain was simply using them
as a final backing for British policy; while in London the Foreign Office
were beginning to feel anxious that the Soviet Union was giving very
little in return for the indirect guarantee to her security contained in the
British guarantees to Poland and Rumania. On 15 April Moscow was
therefore invited to issue parallel guarantees to these countries. Litvinov
preferred to take up a French suggestion; on 18 April he offered a ten-
year alliance against German aggression only to find his proposal again
rebuffed. On 4 May, therefore, he was dismissed and replaced as Foreign
Minister by Molotov. For the next ten weeks Molotov was to exert
himself to convince London and Paris that without Soviet aid then-
system of guarantees was pointless, and that such aid would only be forth-
coming on terms which would ensure Poland and Rumania acting as a
glacis for the Soviet Union. Eventually realising that this was impossible,
the Soviet leadership was to turn to Nazi Germany.
For the Russian proposals were basically impossible for Britain and
France to concede. It proved impossible to persuade Beck, when he came
to London in early April, and thereafter, that Poland would have to accept
Soviet aid, or to persuade M. Gafencu, the Rumanian leader, to moderate
his outright opposition to a Soviet military presence in Rumania. The
British were intent on something which would deter Hitler and lead him
to the conference table, not on a military alliance which would destroy
him. They did not therefore weigh Soviet military aid very high; their
experts expressed grave doubts as to the Soviet capacity, after the great
purges, to attempt anything more than a determined defence against a
German aggression.
The main impact of Litvinov’s fall was felt in Germany. The issue of the
British guarantee to Poland and the progress of Britain’s dam-building
negotiations in eastern Europe both alarmed and infuriated Hitler. At the
end of March he instructed his Chief of Staff to prepare orders for war
with Poland, though these were at first only defined as a ‘precautionary
complement’ to preparations for war in the west to be implemented when
Poland could be isolated diplomatically. His army was also ordered to
prepare for a sudden coup de main against Danzig alone, if the political
situation made this possible. During April his anger mounted, especially
as his diplomacy failed to prevent Anglo-Turkish co-operation. On
28 April he answered Britain’s adoption of conscription by denouncing
both the Anglo-German naval agreement concluded in 1935 and the
German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934. On 6 May Ribbentrop
proposed to Ciano that they should conclude a bilateral alliance without
waiting any more for Japan to overcome her hesitations. The German-
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Italian alliance, the ‘Pact of Steel’, was, in fact, signed on 22 May. Hitler
was, however, well aware that this alone would not be adequate to give
France and Britain pause. If he could detach the Soviet Union from the
West, this would be a very different matter.
The first approach to Russia was made on 20 May by the German
Ambassador in Moscow. His reception by Molotov was, at first sight, so
discouraging that Hitler’s advisers nearly despaired. He persisted however,
and fresh conversations were opened at the end of May. In the meantime,
the first signs of pressure by the Danzig Senate on Poland began to appear.
And on 23 May Hitler revealed to his generals his intention to attack
Poland ‘at the first available opportunity’. He made it clear that he
intended to do his best to isolate Poland first. But if Britain and France
intervened then he was prepared for a showdown with Britain. Japan
might be used to restrain Russia; it was not impossible, however, that
Russia might show herself uninterested in Poland. German diplomacy was
now directed to detaching Rumania from Poland, to stepping up pressure
on the Danzig issue, and to detaching the Soviet Union from the West.
It was not until the end of July that Hitler judged the time to be ripe.
In the intervening two months there was one major crisis, during which it
seems that consideration was given in Berlin to the alternative plan of a
coup de main against Danzig. But the main German drive to disrupt
Britain’s efforts to construct a Balkan bloc around Rumania was only
partially successful. Turkey accepted a British guarantee on 12 May and,
after bullying France to transfer the Sanjak of Alexandretta entirely into
Turkish sovereignty, a French guarantee also. On the Soviet front Hitler
simply had to watch and maintain contact with Moscow while the
British steadily gave way under Soviet pressure only to find that the
agreement they sought was still out of their reach. A British draft of a
pact linked to the League Covenant was rudely rejected on 27 May.
Molotov then demanded its extension to cover the Baltic states of Finland,
Estonia and Latvia. A new British draft was rejected on 22 June. On
1 July Molotov demanded a Soviet alliance with Poland and Rumania,
adding too that the treaties should be operative in the case of ‘indirect
aggression’, a concept which he defined so as to raise the suspicion in
London that the pact was intended to cover Soviet action against any
government they disliked and wished to overthrow. On 23 July Molotov
suddenly demanded that staff talks should begin forthwith.
His motives in doing this are still unclear. But he may have been in-
fluenced by knowledge of the talks held in London in mid-July between
Dr Wohltat, a senior official in Goering’s Four-Year Plan organisation,
and Sir Horace Wilson, the Permanent Under-Secretary in the British
Treasury, and Robert Hudson, President of the Board of Trade. On the
British side these seem to have represented a last attempt by those who
believed in the evidence of a moderate element in Hitler’s entourage to
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lure him away from the path of violence in Europe by the prospect of far-
reaching concessions in the common exploitation of markets and raw
materials in Africa and elsewhere. These conversations, never more than
demi-official on the British side, also involved proposals for disarmament
negotiations, non-intervention declarations, recognition of German
economic primacy in south-east Europe, and, in some versions, a large-
scale British loan. To Molotov they must have raised the spectre of
renewed Soviet isolation and spurred him on to strengthen those circles
in Britain who regarded this kind of talk as totally unrealistic.
The studied deterioration in relations between Danzig and Poland
during June and July lent force to the arguments of this latter school.
After the crisis of the last week in June, fresh disputes arose in mid-July
over the difficulties placed by the Danzig authorities in the way of the
Polish customs inspectors. The Poles instituted economic reprisals, and at
the end of July the Danzig Senate, on Hitler’s orders, dispatched a
deliberately provocative note to the Polish government threatening
reprisals against the Polish customs inspectors. At the same time Ribben-
trop sounded the Soviets as to the possibility of a political agreement.
On 3 August he received a positive reaction. Hitler appears to have
decided now that conditions were right for the isolation and annihilation
of Poland.
The Wilson-Hudson-Wohltat talks certainly played a part in con-
vincing Hitler that the British guarantee for Poland was bluff; more
important was the reluctance of the British Treasury to extend Poland a
loan to purchase armaments and the delays both in the talks on an Anglo-
Polish alliance and in the Anglo-Soviet negotiations. In addition, elements
of the Japanese army in China, furious at the resistance in Tokyo to the
conclusion of the alliance negotiations with Germany, had done their
utmost to provoke a war with Britain by blockading the British concession
at Tientsin. Only very skilful diplomacy on the part of the British Ambas-
sador in Tokyo and strong American pressure had succeeded in averting a
conflict. To Hitler the signs of a breakdown in the British front against
Germany must have seemed ripe for exploitation.
On 4 August the Poles replied to the Danzig Senate that action against
Polish officials in Danzig would be regarded as an act of violence against
the Polish state. Hitler summoned the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig to
Berchtesgaden, and ordered him to step up the pressure so as to provoke
a Polish attack on Danzig. A bellicose German note was given to the
Poles on 9 August, to receive, the following day, an equally violent and
uncompromising reply. German military preparations were ordered to be
completed by 24 August.
At this point Hitler’s own plans began to disintegrate. The negotiations
with Russia went well. On 14 August Molotov proposed a non-aggression
pact, while the Soviet army leaders fenced with the Anglo-French staff
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missions sent to Moscow on Molotov’s invitation. In a series of messages
Hitler beat down the Soviets’ attempt to fence further and on 2 1 August
Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow. Two days later the Nazi-Soviet non-
aggression pact was signed, together with a secret protocol dividing
Poland and eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
The order was given for Danzig to provoke a breach with Poland. Hitler
harangued his generals yet again on the isolation of Poland and the
cowardice of Britain and France. And the order for the German attack
on Poland was set for 4.30 a.m. on 26 August.
The events of 25 August were to prove Hitler wrong. At 4.30 p.m.
Hitler heard that Britain, so far from being deterred by the conclusion of
the Nazi-Soviet pact, had gone ahead and signed a formal alliance with
Poland. At 6 p.m. he heard that Italy would not support him. At the time
of the signature of the Pact of Steel, Italy had stipulated that there should
be no major war in Europe for at least two years. Count Ciano, the
Italian Foreign Minister, had only realised the true direction of German
policy at the beginning of August. On 1 1 August he had descended on
Berchtesgaden, only to be lectured by Hitler and Ribbentrop in a manner
which he took to be arrogant, stupid and deceitful. On his return, he had
succeeded in persuading a reluctant Mussolini that Italian entry into war
was impossible. Much shaken, Hitler countermanded the orders for
attack and the German troops returned to their barracks. The same day
the Japanese government broke off her alliance negotiations with Germany,
in horror at Germany’s union with the country against whom the Anti-
Comintern Pact had originally been concluded. Japanese troops were in
fact engaged in a major military clash with Soviet troops at Nomonhan
on the borders of Outer Mongolia. Several divisions were committed on
each side and Japanese casualties in the fighting, which lasted until
mid-September, were very heavy.
For a day or so it seemed that Hitler had been decisively defeated. But
Hitler had always been half-prepared for war with Britain and France,
and he had already gone too far to recoil. Had his dispute with Poland
been genuine there might have been a chance for a mediatory proposal.
Instead, he evolved one final scheme to isolate Poland diplomatically.
The Poles were to be invited to negotiate in Berlin and the negotiations
then broken off in such a way as to put the blame on the Poles; the
planned attack on Poland would follow immediately. The scheme in-
volved the preparation of what could be represented to the British as a
genuine compromise. With Goering’s assistance, and the use of a neutral
intermediary, a Swedish businessman, Birger Dahlerus, these proposals
were discussed with the British government. At the same time, 28 August,
a new date, 1 September, was set for the attack on Poland.
The scheme foundered on three points. The Poles refused to send a
plenipotentiary to Berlin at such short notice despite very considerable
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British pressure, and the British did not feel that they could be forced to
do so. The actual handing over of the draft German proposals was so
mishandled by Ribbentrop that they barely reached the British in time for
government consideration let alone to make any real impact on British
opinion, which by now had largely accepted the inevitability of war. And
the military timetable was too rigid to allow any time for manoeuvre.
The German attack on Poland duly followed at dawn on i September.
At this point the French Cabinet, clutching at straws to avoid a war
no one wanted and to which large parts of French opinion were bitterly
opposed, persuaded Mussolini to propose a new four-power conference.
After thirty-six hours’ delay a revolt of opinion both in parliament and
Cabinet forced the British government to issue an ultimatum demanding
the withdrawal of German troops from Polish territory within two hours.
The French declaration of war followed six hours later. The second world
war had begun.
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T wo new means of action, or instruments of warfare, that became
prominent in the first world war were the principal causes of
military discussion and controversy during the interval that followed
— the aircraft and the tank. In those twenty years they met more doubt
and criticism than recognition of their potentialities. Yet when the second
world war came they largely dominated its course — especially in the
opening stages.
Another new instrument, a naval one, was of earlier origin, but was
allowed no adequate chance to prove its powers until the first world war.
This was the submarine. Only after the surface duel between the battle-
fleets had clearly become barren, by the middle of the war, was the sub-
marine given such a chance — in the hands of the inferior naval power,
Germany. But then, in 1917, it became dominant in struggle at sea, and
by its potency in blockade brought the superior naval power, Britain, to
the verge of defeat by starvation. Yet after that war it soon fell into neg-
lect, and the possibility of a revival of its threat was discounted by the bulk
of naval opinion, which clung to the illusion, and faith, that the battleship
was again the mistress of the seas — so that when the next great war came in
1939 even Germany had only a handful of submarines. But these soon
became an important factor, and, as their numbers increased, a vital one —
even though their effect was never quite so great as in the previous war.
There was a similar discount, and disparagement, of the effect of air-
craft on surface craft, both directly and indirectly, while such tests as the
navies carried out were designed, and distorted, to show the continued
supremacy and invulnerability of the battleship. It became evident that
its existence was an article of faith rather than a matter of technology
susceptible to scientific test.
Here it should be noted, and emphasised, that all three of the new
instruments, although often described as weapons, were more truly
weapon-carriers. They were means of conveying shells, bombs or tor-
pedoes to operatively close quarters where they could have the maximum
effect — in other words, giving mobility-cum-flexibility to weapons.
A recognition of this basic common quality is of importance because it
brings out the major change in warfare that such new instruments pro-
duced — the development of mechanical power to the point of domination
over manpower.
The significance of such a change was obscured because the diminution
in the number of men employed in a fighting function was offset by the
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increased proportion employed to assist and maintain them administra-
tively. Moreover, this was apt to be increased beyond real need as a way
of absorbing the surplus manpower that became available when war came
and old-style forces were mobilised, regardless of need and of equipment
available, under the influence of former concepts.
In such circumstances the issue of a prolonged war could still be
decided by exhaustion of manpower.
Nevertheless, this condition should not obscure the deeper lesson that,
in modem warfare, there has been a great depreciation in the value of
manpower compared with mechanical power. A nation that is deficient
in mechanical equipment is not likely to have a chance of prolonging the
war if exposed to attack by a well-equipped nation. However many men
the former can put in the field, their value will be discounted by their
mechanical inferiority, and the war be quickly lost. In such a case, although
the attacker may happen to enjoy a superiority in manpower as well as in
mechanical power, the real cause of the decision will lie in his mechanical
advantage. This was very clearly shown in the course of the Italian in-
vasion of Abyssinia in 1935-6. Yet most of the European powers, parti-
cularly France, did not heed the portent.
After the first world war the victorious armies had remained content
to perpetuate the technique of 1918. But a few of the younger soldiers of
the British army — which had rather hesitatingly taken the lead in develop-
ing the tank— became the prophets of a new era of mechanised warfare in
which high-speed tanks, or, as some argued, the combination of tanks and
bombing aircraft, would open the gates of the future.
At the same time the Air Staff in Great Britain, under the leadership of
Lord Trenchard, propounded the view that the bomber would be the
decisive factor in any future war, and would suffice in itself to produce a
decision — by destroying the industrial resources of the opposing power.
That view came to be associated with the writings of an Italian general,
Douhet, but had actually been a primary article in the Royal Air Force
creed long before Douhet’s theory had gained currency. Proceeding from
the fact that aircraft could move in three dimensions, it was urged that,
instead of striking at the opposing army, which blocked the way, the air
force should hop over it and concentrate on destroying the cities and
industrial resources that had in earlier times been covered by the army.
Having been established as a separate service, the R.A.F. had a natural
tendency to develop its own distinctive theory as a way to justify its own
existence. This separateness helped to protect it when the post-war pressure
for economy became severe, and to aid its growth when such pressure
eased — in contrast to the way that the Royal Tank Corps suffered as a
junior part of the army. But it tended to make the R.A.F. unco-operative
in contributing to the development of a combined theory, or even taking
part in exercises with tanks.
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The tank-cum-air theory received more attention in defeated Germany
than it did among the victorious powers, while another quarter highly
receptive to the new idea was the new Soviet Union which had emerged
from the Russian Revolution. In either case, the idea of such a
compound key, applied in the military sphere, was more favoured
than that of a purely bombing key, applied in the national sphere as a
whole.
When the next great war came, twenty-one years after the last, the
tank-cum-air theory was put into practice by Nazi Germany. It achieved
a speedy triumph over Poland in 1939, and a greater one over the western
Allies in 1940. The German army’s leaders have amply acknowledged that
they adopted the theory from its exponents in Britain, and benefited much
by close attention to the practical tests that had been carried out there —
before they had any armoured forces of their own.
Why were its foster-parents so much quicker than the original parent-
country to appreciate and cultivate its potential powers?
The first, and most obvious, explanation is that this new technique of
mechanised warfare, combining tank force and air force to attain a
multiple effect, was naturally suited to the purpose of aggression — since
it offered an increased prospect of rapid success in the offensive.
To peace-desiring and peacefully minded countries it seemed a superflu-
ous luxury: a needless addition to the premium they were paying for
their national insurance policy. When budgets were already strained by the
debts of the first world war, it seemed to their directors desirable to eschew
any change of methods and means that might increase the burden. It was
cheaper — on a short view — to preserve the forces in their old-established
form.
A further explanation, based on the experience of history, is that armies
learn only from defeat. That explains why an army which has been vic-
torious in one war so often loses the next war. Victory induces com-
placency — satisfaction with things as they are. It takes disaster to jolt an
army, or a nation, out of the rut of traditional ways.
After victory had crowned their efforts in 1918, the military chiefs of
the Allied powers were unduly content with their instruments. They were
even inclined to go back to the instruments of 1914. Since several of them
were cavalrymen they exalted the virtues of an arm for which they had an
affectionate attachment, regardless of the small part that horsed cavalry
played in comparison with its scale.
The psychological effect of this ‘vested interest in obsolete knowledge’
was illustrated in a public declaration which Lord Haig made in 1925.
In a little book called Paris, or the Future of War, 1 the present writer had
just set forth a picture of future mechanised warfare, on land and in the
air. Very different, however, was the view of the most influential British
1 Published by Kegan Paul, in the Today and Tomorrow series.
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soldier, the commander-in-chief of Britain’s armies in France in the last
war:
Some enthusiasts today talk about the probability of horses becoming extinct and
prophesy that the aeroplane, the tank, and the motor-car will supersede the horse
in future wars. I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse
in the future are likely to be as great as ever ... I am all for using aeroplanes and tanks,
but they are only accessories to the man and the horse, and I feel sure that as time
goes on you will find just as much use for the horse — the well-bred horse— as you
have ever done in the past.
Nevertheless, the advocates of the new idea prevailed so far that in 1927
the first complete mechanised force that the world had seen was experi-
mentally formed, on Salisbury Plain. Its trials were so successful that the
Chief of the Imperial General Staff spoke of creating ‘ armoured divisions’.
But a conservative reaction soon set in, and in 1928 this first mechanised
force was disbanded — a high officer announcing to the Press at the time:
‘Cavalry are indispensable. Tanks are no longer a menace.’
In 1929 the War Office was persuaded to approve the issue of the first
official manual of mechanised warfare, and it made sufficient impression
to pave the way for a revival of a trial armoured force in 193 1 . A year later
this was dropped, but revived again after a year’s interval. A step forward,
a step back — such was the fluctuating course of progress.
Despite constant opposition, the new technique was by degrees worked
out in practice during these years. Among those who took a leading part
in its development, special tribute is due, first, to the far-ranging theoretical
vision of Colonel Fuller, and then to the practical contribution made by
Colonels Lindsay, Broad, Pile and Hobart, and Major Martel. It was Hobart
who, commanding Britain’s first permanent armoured formation in 1934,
brought the new technique close to perfection.
At that moment, when Britain’s rearmament programme was about to
be launched, after the unmistakable signs that Nazi Germany was re-
arming rapidly, Britain had both the minds and the means to maintain
her original lead in mechanised warfare.
Unhappily, the heads of the War Office, in a pronouncement on policy,
declared their obstinate conviction that ‘We should go slowly with
mechanisation’. Thus the Germans were given the chance to leap ahead.
Meantime, the mechanised experts of the British army were hobbled,
or shelved, apparently as a precaution against their inconvenient per-
sistence.
This treatment was the more unfortunate for Britain’s prospects because
the knowledge gained in developing the new offensive technique had led
to the discovery of an effective counter-technique — in a combination of
mines to delay it, anti-tank guns to check it in co-operation with one’s
own concealed tanks firing from stationary positions, and the latter then
thrusting back when the attackers were in disorder. But it had taken fully
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ten years to gain official acceptance for the offensive technique, and even
then in a half-hearted way. So it was perhaps too much to expect that the
antidote could have been approved and prepared in time, unless the war
had been postponed until 1945.
A survey of the basic factors in the problem which faced Britain led one
towards certain conclusions, mutually linked. First, that, in face of the
growing strength of anti-tank defence, the best chance for applying the
new offensive technique lay in starting with the advantage of surprise and
a superiority in tanks and aircraft. Secondly, that the peace-seeking policy
of France and Britain would inevitably deprive them of this opportunity.
Thirdly, that, in these circumstances, their only hope lay in developing the
powers of a ‘ defensive-offensive ’ strategy — and in providing the necessary
modem means for it. One had to deal with the facts, instead of indulging
in dream-offensives that could have no chance of realisation. 1
With the French the soothing effects of victory were m a g ni fied by the
pressure of economy, and also by their faith in conscription. Victory had
left them with a mass of war material that soon became obsolete, but
which they were unwilling to scrap — whereas by enforcing Germany’s
disarmament they cleared the ground for her to make a fresh start, un-
encumbered by the old tools, and the mental habits that these inculcated.
The enforced abolition of conscription in Germany, which lasted until
1935, also compelled her generals to concentrate on producing an army
of high quality and mobility — whereas the French, by clinging to con-
scription, degenerated into a militia-type army that became less efficient
as the period of service was reduced. Moreover, the leading French
generals were so satisfied with their success in 1918, and so sure of their
own superiormilitary knowledge, that they were the most complacent of all
— and thus the most reluctant to envisage any radical change of technique.
The hindrance was increased by the way that, in the French army, tanks
formed part of the infantry and cavalry, and had long been divided
between these two arms, instead of forming a new and distinct arm.
During the years since the second world war there has been an outpour-
ing of evidence both from documentary archives and from the memoirs of
the political and military chiefs, especially the latter. Indeed, the military
chiefs on the Allies’ side have been so vociferous, and their contentions so
sharply opposed, that it might truly be said that peace brought a fresh kind
of war — the ‘war of the generals’.
This chapter is focused on the main areas of controversy — which
are naturally those theatres where the war was conducted on a partner-
ship basis, without any one power having a clearly defined and accepted
1 See B. H. Liddell Hart, Europe in Arms (2nd ed. 1938), especially chs. 7, 23, 24, 25; The
Defence of Britain ( 1939 ). especially chs. 1-5, 20; The Liddell Hart Memoirs (1965), vol. 1,
especially ch. 12 and Entr’acte; vol. n, chs. 1 (pp. 24-8), 4 (pp. 161-2, 172), 5 (pp. 188-9,
200-4), 6 (pp. 241-6, 253-5), Epilogue (pp. 280-1).
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predominance in the direction of operations. This condition requires a
concentration on the western and Mediterranean theatres, with a relatively
brief treatment of the Russian and Pacific theatres. In such a context, too,
it can only touch lightly on the more purely sea and air operations — over
which controversy has been less, and on a lower level.
There are two principal questions to determine. Were the operations
conducted in a way fitted to achieve the military aim — and the ultimate
political object? What were the errors that can be picked out as having a
great effect on the course and issue of the war?
The answer to the main questions can be reached by examining the war
phase by phase — the phases that formed its turning-points, adverse to the
Allies from 1939 to the autumn of 1942, and then in their favour
increasingly.
This catastrophic war, which ended by opening Russia’s path into the
heart of Europe, has been called by Churchill ‘the unnecessary war’. In
striving to avert it, and curb Hitler, a basic weakness in the policy of
Britain and France was their lack of understanding of strategical factors.
The British statesmen of that time were more ignorant than the French
in this respect, and the major share of the responsibility falls on Baldwin,
for his inertia in facing problems, and on Chamberlain for his unrealistic
way of tackling them.
Through lack of strategic sense, the western Allies slid into war at the
moment most unfavourable to them, and then precipitated an avoidable
disaster of far-reaching consequences. Britain survived by what appeared
to be a miracle — but really because Hitler made the same mistakes that
aggressive dictators have repeatedly made throughout history.
When the tide eventually turned against Hitler — as a result of his turn
away to attack Russia, and of America’s entry into the war — the Allies
forfeited the post-war prospects by pursuing the illusion of ‘victory’ — the
destruction of the immediate antagonists without regard to the future.
In drawing up a balance-sheet, it is important to examine the pre-war
phase — for that was where the causes of the opening disasters in the war
can be traced.
In retrospect it has become clear that the first fatal step, for both sides,
was the German re-entry into the Rhineland in 1936. For Hitler, this move
carried a twofold strategic advantage — it provided cover for Germany’s
key industrial area in the Ruhr, and it provided him with a potential
springboard into France.
Why was this move not checked? Primarily, because France and Britain
were anxious to avoid any risk of armed conflict that might develop into
war. The reluctance to act was increased because the German re-entry into
the Rhineland appeared to be merely an effort to rectify an injustice, even
though done in the wrong way. The British, particularly, being politically
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minded, tended to regard it more as a political than as a military step-
failing to see its strategic implications.
But a further, and decisive, factor was French military unreadiness for
prompt ‘fire-extinguishing’ action. In The Remaking of Modern Armies
(1927), and subsequently, the present writer hademphasised that the pattern
and doctrine of the French army was dangerously out of date and lacking
in flexibility — so ‘rigid’ and ‘ponderous’ that ‘under the test of a future
war it might break down altogether’. He urged that the prime need for
France was to create ‘a mechanised striking force of highly trained long-
service volunteers, to form a spearhead’ — prior to the mobilisation of the
conscript mass.
Charles de Gaulle took up this argument and proposal, making them
the theme of his striking little book of 1934, Vers Varmie de metier. Paul
Reynaud urged the same idea — the need for a mechanised spearhead of
professional troops. But nothing was done to carry it out.
That military factor — the lack of such an immediately available spear-
head — was primary in point of time. It became a check on any riposte to
Hitler’s Rhineland move before political hesitation on the part of the
British government increased the restraint. What Reynaud and de Gaulle
have said about this handicap is borne out by the detailed record of high-
level discussions given in General Gamelin’s Servir, vol. n, and by the
accounts of the ministers who urged prompt and vigorous action, parti-
cularly the Prime Minister, Sarraut, and Paul-Boncour, and Flandin, then
Foreign Minister.
When the French Cabinet met on the morning of 8 March 1936, the
Minister of War, General Maurin, stated that any intervention in the
Rhineland would require a large-scale mobilisation of reservists. Indeed,
according to Flandin, Paul-Boncour, and Mandel, he insisted it would
require ‘general mobilisation’. That grave prospect damped down the
urge for immediate action that had been marked the previous day. The
other two service ministers were equally discouraging. It was only after
this that the decision about action was put off, and left to wait on
the British government’s attitude — which proved negative, on political
grounds.
In his 1938 moves Hitler again drew strategic advantage from political
factors — the German and Austrian peoples’ desire for union, the strong
feeling in Germany about Czech treatment of the Sudeten Germans, and
the widespread feeling in the Western countries that there was a measure
of justice in Germany’s case in both issues.
But Hitler’s march into Austria in March laid bare the southern flank
of Czechoslovakia — which to him was an obstacle in the development of
his plans for eastward expansion. In September he secured — by the threat
of war and the resultant Munich agreement — not merely the return of the
Sudetenland but the strategic paralysis of Czechoslovakia.
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In March 1939 Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and
thereby enveloped the flank of Poland — the last of a series of ‘bloodless’
manoeuvres. This step of his was followed by a fatally rash move on the
British government’s part — the guarantee suddenly offered to Poland and
Rumania, each of them strategically isolated, without first securing any
assurance from Russia, the only power which could give them effective
support.
By their timing, these guarantees were bound to act as a provocation —
and, as we know now, until he was met by this challenging gesture Hitler
had no immediate intention of attacking Poland. By their placing, in parts
of Europe inaccessible to the forces of Britain and France, they provided
an almost irresistible temptation. Thereby the Western powers undermined
the essential basis of the only type of strategy which their deficiency in
mobile striking forces made practicable for them. For, instead of being able
to check aggression by presenting a strong front to any attack in the west,
they gave Hitler an easy chance of breaking a weak front and thus gaining
an initial triumph (cf. above, pp. 725 ff.).
The most extraordinary feature of this period was the statesmen’s belief
that the guarantee given to Poland, which was a strategic absurdity, could
be a deterrent to Hitler — and the only one who voiced a warning of its folly
was Lloyd George. Churchill, who could also see its weakness, and natural
consequence, spoke in favour of it.
Hitler, being strategically minded, was quick to realise that only Russia’s
aid could make it effective. So, swallowing his hatred and fear of ‘Bol-
shevism’, he bent his efforts and energies towards conciliating Russia and
securing her abstention. It was a turn-about even more startling than
Chamberlain’s — and as fatal in its consequences.
On 21 August Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, and the pact was signed on
the 23rd. It was accompanied by a secret agreement under which Poland
was to be partitioned between Germany and Russia.
This pact made war certain — in the intense state of feeling that had been
created by Hitler’s rapid series of aggressive moves. The British, having
pledged themselves to support Poland, felt that they could not stand aside
without losing their honour — and without opening Hitler’s way to wider
conquest. And Hitler would not draw back from his purpose in Poland,
even when he came to see that it involved a general war.
Thus the train of European civilisation rushed into the long, dark tunnel
from which it only emerged after six exhausting years had passed. Even
then, the bright sunlight of victory proved illusory.
On Friday 1 September 1939 the German armies invaded Poland. On
Sunday the 3rd, the British government declared war on Germany, in
fulfilment of the guarantee it had earlier given to Poland. Six hours later
the French government, more reluctantly, followed the British lead.
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Within less than a month Poland had been overrun. Within nine months
most of western Europe had been submerged by the spreading flood of war.
Poland was badly handicapped by her strategic situation — the country
being placed like a ‘tongue ’ between Germany’s jaws, and Polish strategy
made the situation worse by placing the bulk of the forces near the tip of
the tongue. Moreover, these forces were out of date in equipment and
ideas, still placing faith in a large mass of horsed cavalry — which proved
helpless against the German tanks.
The Germans at that time had only six armoured and four mechanised
divisions ready — but, thanks to General Guderian’s enthusiasm, and
Hitler’s backing, they had gone further than any other army in adopting
the new idea of high-speed mechanised warfare that had been conceived
twenty years earlier by the British pioneers of this new kind and tempo of
action. The Germans had also developed a much stronger air force than
any of the other countries — whereas not only the Poles, but the French
also, were badly lacking in air power, even to support and cover their
armies.
Thus Poland saw the first triumphant demonstration of the new Blitz-
krieg technique, by the Germans, while the Western allies of Poland were
still in process of preparing for war on customary lines. On 17 September
the Red Army advanced across Poland’s eastern frontier, a blow in the
back that sealed her fate, as she had scarcely any troops left to oppose this
second invasion.
The German forces had crossed the Polish frontier shortly before 6 a.m.
on 1 September; air attacks had begun an hour earlier. The Luftwaffe
operated in a very dispersed way, instead of in large formations, but it
thereby spread a creeping paralysis over the widest possible area. Another
weighty factor was the German radio bombardment, disguised as Polish
transmissions, which did much to increase the confusion and demoralisa-
tion of the Polish rear. All these factors were given a multiplied effect by
the way that Polish overconfidence in the power of their men to defeat
machines led, on the rebound, to a disintegrating disillusionment.
In the north, the invasion was carried out by Bock’s Army Group,
which comprised the Third Army (under Kuchler) and the Fourth Army
(under Kluge). The former thrust southward from its flanking position
in East Prussia, while the latter pushed eastward across the Polish Corridor
to join it in enveloping the Poles’ right flank. The major role was given to
Rundstedt’s Army Group in the south, which was nearly twice as strong
in infantry, and more in armour. It comprised the Eighth Army (under
Blaskowitz), the Tenth (under Reichenau), and the Fourteenth (under
List). The decisive stroke, however, was to be delivered by Reichenau, in
the centre, and for that purpose he was given the bulk of the armoured
forces.
By 3 September — when Britain and France entered the war — Kluge’s
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advance had cut the Corridor and reached the Lower Vistula, while
Kiichler’s pressure from East Prussia towards the Narev was developing.
What was more important, Reichenau’s armoured forces had penetrated
to the Warta, and forced the crossings there. By the 4th Reichenau’s
spearheads had reached and crossed the Pilica, fifty miles beyond the
frontier. Two days later his left wing was well in rear of Lodz, and his
right wing had driven into Kielce. The Polish armies were splitting up into
unco-ordinated fractions, some of which were retreating while others were
delivering disjointed attacks on the nearest enemy column.
Meanwhile, near the Carpathians, List’s mobile forces swept across the
Dunajec, Biala, Wisloka, and Wislok in turn, to the San on either flank
of the famous fortress of Przemysl. In the north Guderian’s armoured
corps, the spearhead of Ktichler’s army, had pushed across the Narev and
was attacking the line of the Bug, in rear of Warsaw. Thus a wider pincer-
movement was developing outside the inner pincers that were closing on
the Polish forces in the bend of the Vistula west of Warsaw — where the
largest remaining part of the Polish forces was trapped before it could
withdraw over the Vistula. To the advantage which the Germans had
gained by their strategic penetration was now added the advantage of
tactical defence. To complete their victory they had merely to hold their
ground — in face of the hurried assaults of an army which was fighting in
reverse, cut off from its bases.
While the big encirclement west of the Vistula was being tightened the
Germans were now penetrating deeply into the area east of the Vistula.
Moreover, they had turned both the line of the Bug in the north and the
fine of the San in the south. From East Prussia, Guderian’s armoured
corps drove southward in a wide outflanking thrust to Brest-Litovsk. On
List’s front, Kleist’s armoured corps reached the city of Lwow on the 12th.
Although the invading columns were feeling the strain of their deep
advance, and were running short of fuel, the Polish command-system was
so badly dislocated that it could not profit either by the enemy’s temporary
slackening or by the stubbornness that many isolated bodies of Polish
troops still showed.
Then on the 17th came the Russians’ advance across the eastern frontier
of Poland. The German and Russian forces met and greeted each other
on a line running south from East Prussia past Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk,
and Lwow to the Carpathians. Their partnership was sealed, but not
cemented, by a mutual partition of Poland.
Could France and Britain have done more than they did to take the
German pressure off Poland? On the face of the figures of armed strength,
as now known, the answer would, at first sight, seem to be ‘yes’.
The German army was far from being ready for war in 1939. The Poles
and French together had the equivalent of 130 divisions against the Ger-
man total of 98 divisions, of which 36 were in an untrained state. Out of
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the 43 divisions which the Germans left to defend their western frontier,
only n were active divisions, fully trained and equipped, whereas the
French General Staff planned to deploy 85 there. It is thus natural that the
German generals, when interrogated after the war and in their memoirs
since, have all declared that their western front would have been broken
if the French army had made a serious effort to attack it.
But Hitler’s strategy had placed France in a situation where she could
only relieve pressure on Poland by developing a quick attack — a form of
action for which her army was unfitted. Her old-fashioned mobilisation
plan was slow in producing the required weight of forces, and her offensive
plans were dependent on a mass of heavy artillery which would not be
ready until the sixteenth day. By that time the Polish army’s resistance was
collapsing.
The responsibility for the French army’s incapacity to deliver a prompt
attack lies partly with its successive chiefs from Petain to Gamelin, who
were all wedded to slow-motion ways of warfare, and partly with the
political leaders, who clung to the belief that a massive army raised by
conscription was the cheapest and safest form of national defence assur-
ance. Both the military and the political leaders ignored or discounted the
arguments and warnings uttered by Reynaud and de Gaulle.
On the other side of the Channel, a few progressive military thinkers had
urged that the best contribution that Britain could make to the defence of
the West was by the early intervention of a strong air force and a small and
highly efficient mechanised force of two or three armoured divisions —
to offset French weakness in these means. That view momentarily gained
favour in 1937. But, after Munich, the French political and military chiefs
pressed their allies to adopt conscription in order to produce a large army
on the old lines. Their views were shared by the British General Staff,
which was also wedded to old-style ways, and by a growing proportion of
the Cabinet.
Eventually, after Hitler’s move into Prague, the British government
abandoned its former military policy and introduced conscription. That
decision diminished the effective contribution that Britain might have
made, by absorbing industrial resources to equip the mass army now
projected. When war came a force of four infantry divisions was sent to
France while a build-up to 55 divisions was planned. By the spring of
1940, 13 British infantry divisions had arrived in France, but no armoured
division — which would have been far more effective in the circumstances.
The one tank brigade that was on the scene counter-attacked at Arras
with such effect, on the mind of the German Command, as to cause a
pause in the panzer drive towards Lille and Dunkirk.
The rapid overrunning of Poland was followed by a six months’ lull —
christened ‘the Phoney War’ by onlookers who were deceived by the
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surface appearance of calm. A truer name would have been ‘ The Winter of
Illusion’. For the leaders, as well as the public, in the Western countries
spent the time in framing fanciful plans for attacking Germany’s flanks —
and talked about them all too openly.
In reality, there was no prospect of France and Britain ever being able,
alone, to develop the strength required to overcome Germany. Their best
hope, now that Germany and Russia faced each other on a common
border, was that friction would develop between these two mutually
distrustful confederates, and draw Hitler’s explosive force eastwards,
instead of westwards. That happened a year later, and might well have
happened earlier if the Western allies had not been impatient — as is the
way of democracies.
Their loud and threatening talk of attacking Germany’s flanks spurred
Hitler to forestall them. His first stroke was to occupy Norway. The
captured records of his conferences show that, until early in 1940, he still
considered ‘the maintenance of Norway’s neutrality to be the best course’
for Germany, but that in February he came to the conclusion that ‘the
English intend to land there, and I want to be there before them’. A small
German invading force arrived there on 9 April, upsetting the British
plans for gaining control of this neutral area — and captured the chief
ports while the Norwegians’ attention was absorbed by the British naval
advance into Norwegian waters.
The prime responsibility for this fiasco rested on Churchill, who had
re-entered the government on the outbreak of war as First Lord of the
Admiralty, and from September on had pressed for drastic action to cut
off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore, by stopping its transportation
through Norwegian neutral waters. He recognised that this would provoke
the Germans to ‘fire back’, but argued that ‘we have more to gain than
to lose by a German attack upon Norway and Sweden’. His unrealistic
views, and sweeping disregard for Scandinavian neutrality, were supported
by Daladier and Reynaud in turn, and also by Gamelin. His mind and
theirs were filled with dreams of attacking Germany’s Baltic flank by
opening up a new theatre of war in Scandinavia. The outcome soon
showed how unrealistic they were. But the mismanagement of the Allies’
action — the way that a small German force was allowed time to establish
itself and then push back into the sea a larger Allied force — was due mainly
to the fumbling of the British planners and executants, under the direction
of Admiral Pound and Field-Marshal Ironside.
The British counter-moves were slow, hesitant, and bungled. When it
came to the point of action the Admiralty, despite its pre-war disdain for
air power, became extremely cautious and shrank from risking ships at
the places where their intervention could have been decisive. The troop-
moves were still feebler. Although forces were landed at several places
with the aim of ejecting the German invader, they were all re-embarked in
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barely a fortnight, except from one foothold in Narvik — and that was
abandoned a month later, after the main German offensive in the west.
The dream-castles raised by Churchill had come tumbling down. They
had been built on a basic misconception of the situation, and the change in
modem warfare — particularly the effect of air power on sea power.
The German force that captured the capital and chief ports of Norway
in the opening coup was astonishingly small. It comprised seven cruisers,
fourteen destroyers, a number of auxiliary ships, and some 10,000 troops —
the advance elements of three divisions that were used for the invasion.
At no place was the initial landing made by more than two thousand men.
One parachute battalion was also employed — to seize the airfields of Oslo
and Stavanger. This was the first time that parachute troops had been
used in war and they proved very valuable.
But the most decisive factor in the German success was the air force;
the actual strength employed in this campaign was about 800 operational
planes and 250 transport planes. It overawed the Norwegian people in the
first phase, and later paralysed the Allies’ counter-moves.
On the evening of 7 April British aircraft actually spotted ‘strong
German naval forces moving swiftly northward’ across the mouth of the
Skaggerak, towards the Norwegian coast. Churchill says: ‘We found it
hard at the Admiralty to believe that this force was going to Narvik’ —
in spite of a ‘report from Copenhagen that Hitler meant to seize that
port’. The British fleet at once sailed from Scapa, but it would seem that
both the Admiralty and the admirals at sea were filled with the thought of
catching the German battle-cruisers. In their efforts to bring these to battle
they tended to lose sight of the possibility that the enemy had a landward
intention, and lost a chance of intercepting the smaller troop-carrying
warships.
It was unfortunate, and also ironical, that the British minelaying opera-
tion should have absorbed and distracted the Norwegians’ attention during
the crucial twenty-four hours before the Germans landed. As for the
Norwegians’ chances of rallying from the opening blow, this was dimi-
nished by their lack of fighting experience, peaceful spirit, and out-of-date
military organisation.
The weakness of the resistance was all too clearly shown by the speed
with which the invaders raced along the deep valleys to overrun the
country. If the resistance had been tougher, the melting snow on the
valley-sides — which hampered outflanking manoeuvre — would have been
a more serious impediment to the German prospects of success.
The most astonishing of the opening series of coups was that at Narvik,
for this far northern port was some 1,200 miles distant from the German
naval bases. Two Norwegian coast-defence ships gallantly met the
attacking German destroyers but were quickly sunk. Next day a British
destroyer flotilla steamed up the fiord and fought a mutually damaging
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action with the Germans, and then on the 13th these were finished off by
the inroad of a stronger flotilla supported by the battleship Warspite. But
by this time the German troops were established in and around Narvik.
Further south, Trondheim was captured with ease after the German
ships had run the gauntlet of the batteries dominating the fiord — a hazard
that had dismayed Allied experts who had considered the problem. By
securing Trondheim, the Germans had possessed themselves of the
strategic key to central Norway, though the question remained whether
their handful of troops there could be reinforced from the south.
At Bergen, Stavanger, and Kristiansand the Germans suffered some
damage from the Norwegian warships and batteries, but had little trouble
once they were ashore. In the approach to Oslo, however, the main in-
vading force suffered a jolt. For the large cruiser Bliicher, carrying many
of the military staff, was sunk by torpedoes from the Oscarsborg fortress,
and the attempt to force the passage was then given up until this fortress
surrendered in the afternoon, after heavy air attack. Thus the capture of
Norway’s capital devolved on the troops who had landed on the Fomebu
airfield ; in the afternoon this token force staged a parade march into the
city, and its bluff succeeded. But the delay at least enabled the king and
government to escape northwards with a view to rallying resistance.
The capture of Copenhagen was timed to coincide with the intended
arrival at Oslo. The Danish capital was easy of access from the sea, and
shortly before 5 a.m. three small transports steamed into the harbour,
covered by aircraft overhead. The Germans met no resistance on landing,
and a battalion marched off to take the barracks by surprise. At the same
time Denmark’s land frontier in Jutland was invaded, and after a brief
exchange of fire resistance was abandoned.
The occupation of Denmark went far to ensure the Germans’ control
of a sheltered sea-corridor from their own ports to southern Norway, and
also gave them advanced airfields from which they could support the
troops there.
Once the Germans had established a lodgement in Norway the best way
of loosening it would have been to cut them off from supply and reinforce-
ment. That could only be done by barring the passage of the Skaggerak,
between Denmark and Norway. But it soon became clear that the
Admiralty — from fear of German air attack — was not willing to send
anything except submarines into the Skaggerak.
There still appeared to be a chance of preserving central Norway if the
two long mountain defiles leading north from Oslo were firmly held, and
the small German force at Trondheim was quickly overcome. To this aim
British efforts were now bent. A week after the German coup, British
landings were made north and south of Trondheim, at Namsos and
Andalsnes respectively, as a preliminary to the main and direct attack on
Trondheim.
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The advance south from Namsos was upset by the threat to its rear
produced by the landing of several small German parties near the top of
the Trondheim fiord, supported by the one German destroyer in the area..
The advance from Andalsnes, instead of being able to swing north on
Trondheim, soon turned into a defensive action against the German
troops who were pushing from Oslo up the Gudbrand valley and brushing
aside the Norwegians.
As the Allied troops were badly harried by air attack, and lacked air
support themselves, the commanders on the spot recommended evacua-
tion. The re-embarkation of the two forces was completed on i and 2 May
— thus leaving the Germans in complete control of both southern and
central Norway.
The Allies now concentrated on gaining Narvik — more for ‘ face-saving’
purposes than from any continued hope of reaching the Swedish iron
mines. The original British landing in this area had been made on 14 April,
but even when their forces in this area had been built up to 20,000 troops —
five times the occupying power’s strength — their progress was still pain-
fully slow. Not until 27 May were the Germans pushed out of Narvik
town — and by that time still more dramatic events had arisen to the west
of Europe that led to the Allies’ early abandonment of Narvik, their last
foothold in Norway.
For Hitler’s next stroke had been against France and the Low Countries
on io May. He had started to prepare it the previous autumn, when the
Allies rejected the peace offer he made after defeating Poland— feeling
that to knock out France offered the best chance of making Britain agree
to peace. But bad weather and the doubts of his generals had caused
repeated postponements from November onwards. Meanwhile the Ger-
man plan was radically recast. That turned out very unfortunately for the
Allies, and temporarily very lucky for Hitler, while changing the whole
outlook of the war.
The old plan, with the main advance going through the canal-lined area
of central Belgium, would in fact have led to a head-on collision with the
best part of the Franco-British forces, and so would probably have ended
in failure — shaking Hitler’s prestige. But the new plan, suggested by
Manstein, took the Allies completely by surprise and threw them off their
balance, with disastrous results. For, while they were pushing forward into
Belgium, to meet the Germans’ opening assault there and in Holland, the
mass of the German tanks (seven panzer divisions) drove through the hilly
and wooded Ardennes — which the French General Staff, and the British
too, had always regarded as ‘impassable’ to tanks.
Crossing the Meuse with little opposition, they broke through the weak
hinge of the Allied front, and then swept on westwards to the Channel
coast behind the backs of the Allied armies in Belgium, cutting their
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communications. This decided the issue — before the bulk of the German
infantry had even come into action. The British Army barely managed to
escape by sea from Dunkirk. The Belgians and a large part of the French
were forced to surrender. The consequences were irreparable. For when the
Germans struck southwards, the week after Dunkirk, the remaining French
armies proved incapable of withstanding them.
The Battle of France is one of history’s most striking examples of the
decisive effect of a new idea, carried out by a dynamic executant. Guderian
has related how, before the war, his imagination was fired by the idea of
deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces — a long-range
tank drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far back behind
its front. A tank enthusiast, he grasped the potentialities of this idea,
arising from the new current in military thought in Britain after the first
world war.
The German invasion of the west opened with dramatic successes on
the right flank, against key points in the defence of Holland and Belgium.
These strokes, spearheaded by airborne troops, occupied the Allies in such
a way as to distract attention for several days from the main thrust —
which was being delivered in the centre, through the hilly and wooded
country of the Ardennes, towards the heart of France.
The Hague, the capital of Holland, and the hub of its communications,
at Rotterdam, were attacked in the early hours of io May, by airborne
forces, simultaneously with the assault on its frontier defences a hundred
miles to the east. The confusion and alarm created by this double blow,
in front and rear, were increased by the widespread menace of the Luft-
waffe. Exploiting the disorder, German armoured forces raced through
a gap in the southern flank and joined up with the airborne forces at
Rotterdam on the third day. They cut through to their objective under the
nose of the Seventh French Army, which was just arriving to the aid of the
Dutch.
On the fifth day the Dutch capitulated, although their main front was
still unbroken. Their surrender was accelerated by the threat of close-
quarter air attack on their crowded cities.
The invasion of Belgium also had a sensational opening. Here the
ground attack was carried out by the powerful Sixth Army under Reichenau
(which included Hoeppner’s XVI Panzer Corps). It had to overcome a
formidable barrier before it could effectively deploy. Only 500 airborne
troops were left to help this attack. They were used to capture the two
bridges over the Albert Canal and the Fort of Eben Emael, Belgium’s most
modem fort, which flanked this waterline-frontier.
By the second morning sufficient German troops had arrived over the
canal to burst through the shallow Belgian line of defence behind. Then
Hoeppner’s two panzer divisions (the 3rd and 4th) drove over the un-
demolished bridges and spread over the plains beyond. Their on-sweeping
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drive caused the Belgian forces to start a general retreat — just as the
French and British were arriving to support them.
This breakthrough in Belgium was not the decisive stroke in the in-
vasion of the west, but it had a vital effect on the issue. It not only drew
the Allies’ attention in the wrong direction but absorbed the most mobile
part of the Allied forces in the battle that developed there, so that these
mobile divisions could not be pulled out and switched south to meet the
greater menace that on 13 May suddenly loomed up on the French
frontier — at its weakest part, beyond the western end of the incomplete
Maginot Line. For the mechanised spearheads of Rundstedt’s Army
Group had meantime been driving through Luxemburg and Belgian
Luxemburg towards France. After traversing that seventy-mile stretch
of the Ardennes, and brushing aside weak opposition, they crossed the
French frontier and emerged on the banks of the Meuse— early on the
fourth day of the offensive.
What proved fatal to the French was not, as is commonly imagined,
their defensive attitude or ‘ Maginot Line complex’, but the more offensive
side of their plan. By pushing into Belgium with their left shoulder forward
they played into the hands of their enemy, and wedged themselves in a
trap — just as had happened with their near-fatal Plan xvn of 1914. It was
the more perilous this time because the opponent was more mobile,
manoeuvring at motor-pace instead of at foot-pace. The penalty, too, was
the greater because the left shoulder push — made by three French armies
and the British — comprised the most modemly equipped and mobile part
of the Allied forces as a whole.
The German advance through the Ardennes was a tricky operation,
and an extraordinary feat of staffwork. Before dawn on 10 May the
greatest concentration of tanks yet seen in war was massed opposite the
frontier of Luxemburg. Made up of three panzer corps, these were
arrayed in three blocks, or layers, with armoured divisions in the first two,
and motorised infantry divisions in the third. The van was led by General
Guderian, and the whole was commanded by General von Kleist. To the
right of Kleist’s group lay a separate panzer corps under Hoth, which was
to dash through the northern part of the Ardennes, to the Meuse between
Givet and Dinant.
These seven armoured divisions formed only a fraction of the armed
mass that was drawn up along the German frontier ready to plunge into
the Ardennes. Some fifty divisions were closely packed on a narrow but
very deep front. The chances of success, however, essentially depended on
the quickness with which the German panzer forces could push through
the Ardennes and cross the Meuse.
The race was won, though with little margin. The result might have
been different if the defending forces had been capable of profiting from
the partial checks caused by demolition that were carried out according
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to previous plan. It was unfortunate for the security of France that these
demolitions were backed by no adequate defenders.
Guderian’s attack was concentrated on a i^-mile stretch of the river
just west of Sedan. The assault was launched at 4 p.m., led by the panzer
infantry in rubber boats and on rafts. Ferries were soon in operation,
bringing light vehicles across. The river salient was quickly overrun, and
the attackers pressed on to capture the Bois de Marfee and the southern
heights. By midnight the wedge was driven nearly five miles deep, while
a bridge was completed at Glaire (between Sedan and St Menges) over
which the tanks began to pour.
The bridge was heavily attacked by the Allied air forces, which enjoyed
a temporary advantage as the weight of the Luftwaffe had been switched
elsewhere. But the anti-aircraft artillery regiment of Guderian’s corps kept
a thick canopy of fire over the vital bridge, and Allied air attacks were
beaten off with heavy loss.
By the night of the 16th the westward drive had gone more than fifty
miles further, towards the Channel, and reached the Oise.
The issue had turned on the time factor at stage after stage. French
counter-movements were repeatedly thrown out of gear because their
timing was too slow to catch up with the changing situations, and that was
due to the fact that the German van kept on moving faster than the Ger-
man High Command had contemplated. The French chiefs had based then-
plans on the assumption that an assault on the Meuse would not come
before the ninth day. That was the same time-scale the German chiefs had
in mind originally, before Guderian intervened ! When it was upset, worse
was to follow.
The French commanders, trained in the slow-motion methods of 1918,
were mentally unfitted to cope with panzer pace, and it produced a
spreading paralysis among them.
Reynaud made a move to replace Gamelin — summoning Weygand,
Foch’s old assistant, from Syria. Weygand did not arrive until the 19th
so that for three days the Supreme Command was in a state of suspense.
On the 20th Guderian reached the Channel, cutting the communications
of the Allied armies in Belgium. Moreover, Weygand was even more
out of date than Gamelin, and continued to plan on 1918 lines. So hope
of recovery faded.
On the 1 6th the British Expeditionary Force had made a step back from
its advanced line in front of Brussels. Before it reached its new position on
the Scheldt, this had been undermined by Guderian cutting communica-
tions far to the south. On the 19th the Cabinet heard that Gort was
‘examining a possible withdrawal towards Dunkirk if that were forced
upon him’. The Cabinet, however, sent him orders to march south into
France and force his way through the German net that had been flung
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across his rear — though they were told that he had only four days’
supplies and ammunition sufficient for one battle.
Gort, though arguing that the Cabinet’s instructions were impracticable,
tried an attack southward from Arras with two of his twelve divisions and
the only tank brigade that had been sent to France. When this counter-
stroke was launched on the 21st it had boiled down to an advance by two
tank battalions followed by two infantry battalions. The tanks made some
progress but were not backed up, the infantry being shaken by dive-
bombing. It is remarkable, however, what a disturbing effect this little
tank counterstroke had on some of the German higher commanders. For
a moment it led them to think of stopping the advance of their own tank
spearheads. After the flash-in-the-pan at Arras the Allied armies in the
north made no further effort to break out of the trap, while the belated
relief offensive from the south that Wegyand planned was so feeble as to
be almost farcical.
On the evening of the 25th Gort took the definite decision to retreat to
the sea, at Dunkirk. Forty-eight hours earlier, the German panzer forces
had already arrived, on the canal line only ten miles from the port !
Next day the Belgian army’s line cracked in the centre under Bock’s
attack, and no reserves were left at hand to fill the gap. King Leopold had
already sent repeated warnings to Churchill, through Admiral Keyes,
that the situation was becoming hopeless. Most of Belgium had already
been overrun and the army had its back close to the sea, penned in a
narrow strip of land that was packed with civilian refugees. So in the late
afternoon the king decided to sue for an armistice — and the ‘cease fire’
was sounded early the next morning.
The British retreat to the coast now became a race to re-embark before
the German trap closed — notwithstanding French protests and bitter
reproaches. It was fortunate that preparatory measures had begun in
England a week before. Admiral Ramsay, commanding at Dover, had
been placed in operational control on the previous day, the 19th. A number
of ferry-craft, naval drifters and small coasters were at once collected for
what was called ‘Operation Dynamo’.
In the days that followed the situation became rapidly worse, and it was
soon clear to the Admiralty that Dunkirk would be the only possible
route of evacuation. ‘Dynamo’ was put into operation on the afternoon
of the 26th — twenty-four hours before the Belgian appeal for an armistice,
and also before the Cabinet had authorised the evacuation. At first it was
not expected that more than a small fraction of the B.E.F. could be saved.
In the next three days the air attacks increased, and on 2 June daylight
evacuation had to be suspended. The fighters of the R.A.F., from airfields
in southern England, did their utmost to keep the Luftwaffe at bay, but,
being outnumbered and unable to stay long over the area, because of the
distance, they could not maintain anything like adequate air cover. The
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oft-repeated bombing attacks were a severe strain on the troops waiting
on the beaches, though the soft sand blanketed the effects.
Far more material damage was done over the sea, where the losses
included six destroyers, eight personnel ships, and over two hundred small
craft, out of a total of 860 British and Allied vessels of all sizes employed
in the evacuation.
It was very lucky that the German navy made very little attempt to
interfere, either with U-boats or E-boats. Happily, too, the evacuation
was favoured by extremely good weather. By 30 May 126,000 troops had
been evacuated, while all the rest of the B.E.F. had arrived in the Dunkirk
bridgehead — except for fragments that were cut off during the retreat.
By midnight on 2 June the British rearguard embarked and the evacua-
tion of the B.E.F. was complete — 224,000 men had been safely brought
away, and only some 2,000 were lost in ships sunk en route to England.
Some 95,000 Allied troops, mainly French, had also been evacuated. On
the next night every effort was made to bring away the remaining French-
men, despite increasing difficulties, and 26,000 more were saved. Unfortu-
nately a few thousand of the rearguard were left — and this left sore feelings
in France.
By the morning of the 4th, when the operation was broken off, a total of
338,000 British and Allied troops had been landed in England. It was an
amazing result compared with earlier expectations, and a grand perform-
ance on the part of the navy.
At the same time it is evident that the preservation of the B.E.F. would
have been impossible without Hitler’s action in halting the panzer forces
outside Dunkirk twelve days before, on 24 May.
Hitler had been in a highly strung and jumpy state ever since the break-
through into France. The extraordinary easiness of his advance, and
the lack of resistance he had met, had made him uneasy. The effects can
be followed in the diary that was kept by Haider, the Chief of the General
Staff. On the 17th, the day after the French defence behind the Meuse had
dramatically collapsed, Haider noted: ‘Fuehrer is terribly nervous.
Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so
would rather pull the reins on us.’
Hitler’s doubts revived as his panzer forces swung northward, especially
after the momentary alarm caused by the British tank counter-attack from
Arras, slight as this was. They were reinforced when he visited Rundstedt’s
headquarters on the morning of 24 May, a crucial moment. For Rund-
stedt, in his review of the situation, dwelt on the way that the tank strength
had been reduced in the long and rapid drive, and pointed out the possi-
bility of having to meet attacks from the north and south, particularly
from the latter direction.
On Hitler’s return to his own headquarters in the afternoon, he sent
for the commander-in-chief, and gave him a definite halt order — Haider
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that evening mournfully summarised its effect in his diary: ‘The left wing,
consisting of armoured and motorised forces, which has no enemy in
front of it, will thus be stopped in its tracks by direct orders of the Fuehrer.
Finishing off the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe!’
If Hitler had felt that his halt order was due to Rundstedt’s influence,
he would almost certainly have mentioned it after the British escape
among the excuses he gave for his decision, for he was very apt to blame
others for any mistakes. It seems more likely that Hitler went to Rund-
stedt’s headquarters in the hope of finding further justification for his own
doubts and for the change of plan he wanted to impose.
At the same time there is evidence that even the Luftwaffe was not used
as fully or as vigorously as it could have been — and some of the air chiefs
say that Hitler put the brake on again here.
All this caused the higher circles to suspect a political motive behind
Hitler’s military reasons. Blumentritt, who was Rundstedt’s operational
planner, connected it with the surprising way that Hitler had talked when
visiting their headquarters: ‘He then astonished us by speaking with
admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and
of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He compared the
British Empire with the Catholic Church — saying they were both essential
elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain
was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent.’
Hitler’s character was of such complexity that no simple explanation
is likely to be true. It is more probable that his decision was woven of
several threads. Three are visible — his desire to conserve tank strength for
the next stroke, his long-standing fear of marshy Flanders, and Goering’s
claims for the air force. But some political thread may have been inter-
woven with these military ones in the mind of a man who had a bent for
political strategy and so many twists in his thoughts.
The new French front along the Somme and the Aisne was longer than
the original one, while the forces available to hold it were much diminished.
The French had lost 30 of their own divisions in the first stage of the
campaign, besides the help of their allies. (Only two British divisions
remained in France, though two more that were not fully trained were now
sent over.) In all, Weygand had collected 49 divisions to cover the new
front, leaving 17 to hold the Maginot Line.
The Germans, by contrast, had brought their 10 armoured divisions
up to strength again with relays of fresh tanks, while their 130 infantry
divisions were almost untouched.
For the new offensive the forces were redistributed, two fresh armies
being inserted to increase the weight along the Aisne sector, and Guderian
was given command of a group of two armoured corps that was moved
to lie up in readiness there. Kleist was left with two such corps, to strike
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from the bridgeheads over the Somme at Amiens and Peronne respectively,
in a pincer-move aimed to converge on the lower reach of the Oise near
Creil. The remaining armoured corps was to advance between Amiens
and the sea.
The offensive was launched on 5 June, initially on the western stretch
between Laon and the sea. Resistance was stiff for the first two days, but
on the 7th the most westerly armoured corps broke through on the roads
to Rouen, and the Germans met no serious resistance in crossing the
Seine on the 9th.
Kleist’s pincer-stroke did not, however, go according to plan. The right
pincer eventually broke through on the 8th but the left pincer, from
Peronne, was hung up by tough opposition north of Compiegne. The
German Supreme Command then decided to pull back Kleist’s group and
switch it east to back up the breakthrough that had been made in
Champagne.
The offensive there did not open until the 9th, but then the collapse
came quickly. As soon as the infantry masses had forced the crossings,
Guderian’s tanks swept through the breach towards Chalons-sur-Mame,
and then eastward. By the 1 ith Kleist was widening the sweep and crossed
the Marne at Chateau-Thierry. The drive continued at racing pace to the
Swiss frontier — cutting off all the French forces in the Maginot Line.
As early as the 7th Weygand advised the French government to ask for
an armistice without delay, and next day he announced— 1 the Battle of the
Somme is lost’. The government, though divided in opinion, hesitated to
yield, but on the 9th decided to leave Paris. It wavered between a choice
of Brittany and Bordeaux, and then went to Tours as a compromise.
On the 10th Italy declared war. Mussolini had been belatedly offered
various colonial concessions, but spurned them in the hope of improving
his position with Hitler. An Italian offensive, however, was easily held in
check by the French.
The French Cabinet was now divided between capitulation and a con-
tinuance of the war from North Africa, but only decided to move itself
to Bordeaux, while instructing Weygand to attempt a stand on the Loire.
The Germans entered Paris on the 14th and were driving deeper on the
flanks. On the 16th they reached the Rhone valley.
Meanwhile Weygand had continued to press the need for an armistice,
backed by all the principal commanders. In a last-hour effort to avert this
decision, and ensure a stand in Africa, Churchill made a far-reaching
proposal for a Franco-British Union. It made little impression, except
to produce irritation. A vote was taken upon it, a majority of the French
Cabinet rejected it, and it turned into a decision for capitulation. For
Reynaud resigned, whereupon a new Cabinet was formed by Marshal
Petain and the request for the armistice was transmitted to Hitler on the
night of the 16th.
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On the 22nd the German terms were accepted, and the armistice became
effective at 1.35 a.m. on 25 June, after an accompanying armistice with
Italy had been arranged.
Britain was now the only remaining active opponent of Nazi Germany.
But she was left in the most perilous situation, militarily naked while
menacingly enveloped by a 2,000 mile stretch of enemy-occupied coastline.
Even though the bulk of the British army had got away safely, it had lost
most of its arms. If the Germans had landed in England any time during
the month after the fall of France there would have been little chance of
resisting them.
Naval interception would have been difficult, slow, and uncertain. The
British fleet was kept far away in the north — to keep it out of the reach of
the Luftwaffe. For the moment the Channel ‘tank-ditch’ was a more
effective shield than sea power.
Britain’s land forces could have done little to stop the enemy if his
troops had actually got ashore. Although the army managed to escape
from the debacle in France, it had left the bulk of its weapons and equip-
ment behind. Barely five hundred guns of any sort and two hundred odd
tanks remained in the country for use by the troops who had to defend
Britain’s shores. Months would pass before the factories could turn out
sufficient weapons to make up the quantity lost at Dunkirk. There was
only one near-fully-equipped division in the country. Even by mid-July
there were only two.
The Home Guard could contribute large numbers of men, and plenty
of spirit, but suffered from a lack of equipment and training until long
after the threat of invasion had passed. Originally formed in mid-May,
under the title of ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, a quarter of a million men
between sixteen and sixty-five years of age enrolled within a week, and the
total reached about 300,000 by the end of that month. But rifles were
available for barely 100,000, and the rest had to depend on primitive
improvised weapons such as bludgeons and pikes. By the end of July the
force had risen to a total of nearly half a million, renamed the Home
Guard on the 3 1st of that month, but it received few further rifles until late
in the year. Indeed, even by the spring of 1942 when the numbers of the
Home Guard were over one and a half million men, a quarter of them
were still without a rifle or other personal weapon.
Happily the Germans’ bid to gain command of the air, as a preliminary
to invasion, was frustrated by the superb efforts of the fifty odd squadrons
of Fighter Command — under the masterly direction of Air Marshal
Sir Hugh Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Park, who commanded No. II
Group in south-east England. Even on the modified figures ascertained
since the war, they brought down a total of 1,733 German fighters and
bombers by the end of October, for a loss of 915 British fighters. (The
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Germans’ initial strength was over 1,300 bombers and an equal number of
fighters, while the British defence had barely 600 fighters serviceable and
available at the outset.)
In August and September 1940, the threat of invasion had been partially
eclipsed by the fight overhead, for air supremacy, that was dramatically
epitomised by the title of the ‘Battle of Britain’. This in turn was succeeded
by the prolonged night-time ‘blitz’ of London and other main industrial
centres. The strain was severe, and the defence largely ineffective.
But there were other saving factors, of even more importance. The first
was that Hitler and his service chiefs had made no preparations to invade
England — nor even worked out any plans for such an obviously essential
follow-up to their defeat of France. He let the vital month slip away in
hopeful expectation that Britain would agree to make peace.
Even when disillusioned on that score, the German preparations were
half-hearted. When the Luftwaffe failed to drive the R.A.F. out of the sky
in the ‘ Battle of Britain’, the army and navy chiefs were glad of the excuse
thus provided for suspending the invasion. More remarkable was Hitler’s
own readiness to accept excuses for its suspension.
The records of his private talks show that it was partly due to a reluctance
to destroy Britain and the British Empire, which he regarded as a stabilising
element in the world, and still hoped to secure as a partner.
But beyond this reluctance there was a fresh impulse. Hitler’s mind was
again turning eastward. This was the key factor that proved decisive in
preserving Britain.
If Hitler had concentrated on defeating Britain, her doom would have
been almost certain. For, although he had missed his best chance of con-
quering her by invasion, he could have developed such a stranglehold, by
combined air and submarine pressure, as to ensure her gradual starvation
and ultimate collapse.
Hitler, however, felt that he could not venture to concentrate his re-
sources on that sea-and-air effort while the Russian army stood poised on
his eastern border, as a threat to Germany on land. So he argued that the
only way to make Germany’s rear secure was to attack and defeat Russia.
His suspicion of Russia’s intentions was all the more intense because
hatred of Russian Communism had so long been his deepest emotion.
He also persuaded himself that Britain would agree to peace once she
could no longer hope for Russian intervention in the war.
As early as 21 July, at the first Conference on the hastily drafted plans
for invading England, he declared his conclusion: ‘Our attention must
be turned to tackling the Russian problem.’ Planning for it started
immediately, though not until early in 1941 did he take the definite
decision.
As an alternative course Hitler’s naval adviser, Admiral Raeder, had
repeatedly urged him to concentrate on crippling Britain indirectly by
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capturing the keys of the Mediterranean. But Hitler showed little
interest in such projects and opportunities — he was obsessed with Russia.
That was the more fortunate for Britain, since her overseas positions
had been put in grave peril already by Fascist Italy’s entry into the war
in June 1940 — on Mussolini’s impulse to exploit France’s downfall
and Britain’s weakness — as well as by Japan’s growing threat in the Far
East.
Initially, the extension of the war to the Mediterranean turned out to
Britain’s advantage, as it offered her a chance for counterattack, in an
area where sea power could exert its influence. Churchill was quick to
seize it — in part too quick. Despite the misgivings of the service chiefs,
he sent to Africa part of Britain’s scanty reserve of equipped troops, even
while the homeland lay under imminent threat of invasion. His bold
decision was justified by the way that Wavell’s mechanised forces, although
small, soon smashed the out-of-date Italian army in North Africa, besides
conquering Italian East Africa. They could have driven on to Tripoli, and
thus cleared the enemy completely out of Africa — but were halted in order
to provide the means of sending a British force to Greece.
When Hitler’s attack on the West had reached a point — with the breach
of the impoverished Somme-Aisne front — where the defeat of France
became certain, Mussolini had brought Italy into the war, on xo June 1940,
in the hope of gaining some of the spoils of victory. It appeared to be an
almost completely safe decision from his point of view, and almost
certainly fatal to Britain’s position in the Mediterranean and Africa.
There was nothing available for the moment to reinforce the small
fraction of the British army that guarded Egypt and the Sudan against
the imminent threat of invasion from the Italian armies in Libya and
Italian East Africa. Numerically, these armies were overwhelmingly
superior to the scanty British forces opposing them, under General
Sir Archibald Wavell. There were barely 50,000 British troops facing a
total of half a million Italian and Italian colonial troops.
On the southerly fronts, the Italian forces in Eritrea and Abyssinia
mustered more than 200,000 men, and could have pushed westwards into
the Sudan — which was defended by a mere 9,000 British and Sudanese
troops — or southwards into Kenya, where the garrison was no larger.
On the North African front a still larger force in Cyrenaica under
Marshal Graziani faced the 36,000 British, New Zealand and Indian
troops who guarded Egypt. The Western Desert, inside the Egyptian
frontier, separated the two sides on this front. The foremost British
position was at Mersa Matruh, 120 miles inside the frontier and some
200 miles west of the Nile Delta.
The situation was all the worse because Italy’s entry into the war had
made the sea route through the Mediterranean too precarious to use, and
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reinforcements had to come to Egypt by the extremely roundabout Cape
route — down the west coast of the African continent and up the east
coast into the Red Sea.
But it was not until 13 September that the Italians, after massing more
than six divisions, began a cautious move forward into the Western
Desert. After advancing 50 miles, less than half way to the British position
at Mersa Matruh, they sat down at Sidi Barrani, and there established
themselves in a chain of fortified camps — which were too widely separated
to support one another. Week after week then passed without any attempt
to move on. Meanwhile reinforcements reached Wavell, including three
armoured regiments — rushed out from England in three fast merchant
ships, on Churchill’s initiative.
Wavell now decided that, as the Italians did not come on, he would
sally forth and strike at them. The stroke was planned, not as a sustained
offensive, but rather as a large-scale raid. Wavell thought of it as a sharp
punch to stun the invaders temporarily while he diverted part of his strength
down to the Sudan, to push back the other Italian army there. Thus,
unfortunately, no adequate preparations were made to follow up the over-
whelming victory that was actually gained.
The British force under General O’Connor consisted of only 30,000
men, against an opposing force of 80,000 — but it had 275 tanks against
130. The fifty heavily armoured ‘Matildas’ of the 7th Royal Tank Regi-
ment, impervious to most of the enemy’s anti-tank weapons, played a
particularly decisive role in this and subsequent battles.
On the night of 7 December the force moved out from the Matruh
position on its 70-mile approach through the desert. Next night it passed
through a gap in the enemy’s chain of camps, capturing three of these in
turn on the following day, and the cluster around Sidi Barrani on the
10th — with a total bag of nearly 40,000 prisoners.
The remnants of the invading Italian army, after recrossing their own
frontier, took refuge in the coast-fortress of Bardia. There they were
speedily isolated by the encircling sweep of the 7th Armoured Division.
Unfortunately, there was no backing-up infantry division at hand to take
advantage of their demoralisation. For Wavell had planned to take away
the 4th Indian Division as soon as Sidi Barrani was captured, and to bring
it back to Egypt for dispatch to the Sudan. Thus on the third day of battle,
when the routed Italians were running westwards in panic, half the victor’s
force had been marching eastwards — back to back ! Three weeks elapsed
before the 6th Australian Division arrived, from Palestine, to aid in con-
tinuing the British advance.
On 3 January 1941 the assault on Bardia was at last launched, with
twenty-two Matildas of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment leading the way —
as ‘tin-openers’. The defence quickly collapsed and by the third day the
whole garrison had surrendered — with 45,000 men. The coastal fortress of
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Tobruk was attacked on 21 January and fell next day — yielding a bag of
30,000 prisoners.
But Churchill’s imagination was now chasing a different hare. Following
the scent of his old venture in the first world war, and stimulated by the
way that the Greeks were standing up to the Italians, he pictured the possi-
bility of creating a powerful combination of the Balkan countries against
Germany. It was an attractive picture, but in the actual circumstances
unrealistic, for the primitive Balkan armies had no power to withstand
Germany’s air and tank forces, while Britain could send them very little.
Early in January Churchill had pressed the Greeks to accept a contingent
of British tank and artillery units, to be landed at Salonika. But General
Metaxas, then head of the Greek government, declined the proposal,
saying that the force offered would be likely to provoke a German invasion
without being nearly strong enough to counter it.
This polite rebuff from the Greek government coincided with O’Connor’s
capture of Tobruk, so the British government now decided to allow him
to push on another step and capture the port of Benghazi. On 3 February,
however, air reports showed that the enemy was preparing to abandon
Benghazi, and retreat to the Agheila bottleneck, where they could block
the route from Cyrenaica into Tripolitania. O’Connor immediately
planned a bold stroke to intercept the enemy’s withdrawal, employing
only the depleted 7th Armoured Division and dispatching it across the
desert interior with the aim of reaching the coast-road well beyond
Benghazi. It had about 150 miles to go, from its position at Mechili — the
first long stretch being across extremely rough country. It moved off with
only two days’ rations and a bare sufficiency of petrol.
By the evening of the 5th, its two columns had established blocking
positions across the enemy’s routes of retreat. By the morning of the 7th
the Italians had abandoned their efforts to break through, and 20,000
men had surrendered, while over 100 tanks had been lost or abandoned —
of which nearly all were newly arrived cruiser tanks. The British cutting-off
force here mustered only 3,000 men, with 38 cruiser tanks. When Bardia
and its garrison fell, Anthony Eden had coined a new version of Churchill’s
famous phrase, saying ‘ never has so much been surrendered by so many
to so few’. That was even more true of the crowning victory at Beda Fomm.
The radiance of victory, however, was soon dimmed. That was due to
top-level decisions in London. The complete extinction of Graziani’s army
had left the British with a clear passage, through the Agheila bottleneck,
to Tripoli. But just as O’Connor and his troops were hoping to race on
there — and throw the enemy out of his last foothold in North Africa —
they were definitely stopped by order of the British Cabinet. What had
produced this somersault? Metaxas had died suddenly, on 29 January,
and the new Greek Prime Minister was a man of less formidable character.
Churchill saw an opportunity of reviving his cherished Balkan project,
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and was prompt to seize it. He again pressed his offer on the Greek
government — and this time they were persuaded to accept it. On 7 March
the first contingent of a British force of 50,000 troops landed in Greece.
Churchill had reverted to his old fault of seeing and attempting too
many things at the same time. He dreamed of opening up a new theatre
of war in the Balkans, and marshalling the countries there for a combined
attack on Germany’s flank. Overborne by his personality, the British
Chiefs of Staff and Wavell assented to his unrealistic project. But the
Germans promptly swept into, and over, Yugoslavia and Greece — and
the British were driven to a second ‘Dunkirk’. While still shaken, they
were also ejected from Crete.
The British force (of approximately 3 divisions) under General Wilson
had been moving into position on the central sector, between the main
Greek armies (of 14 divisions) facing the Italians in Albania and the
smaller Greek force (of 3 divisions) near Salonika. It was to cover the
approaches to southern Greece, and take under command the three weak
Greek divisions already assigned for that purpose. Before it could get into
position the Germans had struck, on 6 April. Ten days previously the
Yugoslav government, after being coerced into a pact with Hitler, had
been overthrown by an officers’ coup headed by General Simovitch. Hitler
had promptly decided to invade Yugoslavia and Greece simultaneously,
reshuffling the German forces and reinforcing them for the enlarged
operation — from 18 divisions to 28, of which 7 were to be panzer divisions
(out of his total of 17 in Europe). They were supported by about a thousand
aircraft.
Within barely a week, by 5 April, one of the three corps of List’s
Twelfth Army, now in Bulgaria, had been moved across to the south-
eastern frontier of Yugoslavia, opening fresh supply routes, while Kleist’s
panzer group was switched north-westward to that country’s central
frontier close to Belgrade, the capital. At the same time Weichs’s Second
Army was assembled in southern Austria ready, along with Hungarian
forces, to invade the northern half of Yugoslavia.
The attack opened with a devastating air bombardment of Belgrade and
other centres. Then the land thrusts disrupted the Yugoslav Army, which
soon collapsed under their multiple pressure. Meantime List’s two
westerly corps quickly overran Greece’s shallow coastal strip in Macedonia
and Thrace, while his third corps drove into the south of Yugoslavia.
Reaching Skoplje on the second evening, 7 April, it separated that country
from Greece, made touch with the Italian Army in Albania, and was free
to swing southward into Greece, along with the neighbouring German
corps (of List’s army).
Besides cutting off the retreat of the main Greek armies in Albania, the
Germans thus turned the flank of Wilson’s force before his British troops
were even in position. On 10 April Wilson began a withdrawal, which
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developed into a quickening series of rearward moves as the Germans
successively bypassed his inland flank. By the 21st, when his troops were
still holding the Thermopylae line, 130 miles south of the original position,
it was agreed with the Greek government that the British force should be
evacuated. This evacuation, from the southernmost ports of Greece in the
Peloponnese, began on the night of the 24th and most of the remaining
troops were taken off by the 28th. The bulk was taken to Crete.
In Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler’s new armoured forces had proved
as irresistible as in the plains of Poland and France, despite the mountain
obstacles they met. They had swept through both countries like a whirl-
wind and knocked over the opposing armies like ninepins. Field-Marshal
List’s army alone captured 90,000 Jugoslavs, 270,000 Greeks and
13,000 British, at a cost to itself of barely 5,000 men killed and wounded,
as later records showed. (At the time British newspapers estimated the
German loss as over a quarter of a million, and even a British official
statement put them as ‘probably 75,000’.)
Crete became the Germans’ next objective — although Hitler himself was
a reluctant convert to the scheme. He had wanted to break off the Balkan
campaign after reaching the south of Greece, but General Student, the
commander of the airborne forces, gained Goering’s support on 21 April;
he then succeeded in convincing Hitler that it was practicable — and
desirable. He was allowed to use for the purpose Germany’s one parachute
division, her one glider regiment, and a mountain division — to be trans-
ported by air.
At 8 a.m. on 20 May some 3 ,000 parachute troops were dropped on Crete.
The island was held by 28,600 British, Australian and New Zealand troops,
along with two Greek divisions amounting in numbers to almost as many.
But there were merely half a dozen tanks, and air support was lacking.
The attack had been expected, as a follow-up to the Germans’ conquest
of the Balkans, and good information about the preparation had been
provided by British agents in Greece. But the airborne threat was not
regarded as seriously as it should have been — especially by the commander
in Crete, General Freyberg.
By the first evening, the number of Germans on the island had been
more than doubled, and was progressively reinforced — by parachute drop,
by glider and from the second evening onwards by troop-carriers. These
began landing on the captured Maleme airfield while it was still swept by
the defenders’ artillery and mortar-fire. The ultimate total of German
troops brought by air was about 22,000. Many were killed and injured by
crashes on landing, but those that survived were the toughest of fighters,
whereas their numerically superior opponents were not so highly trained
and were still suffering from the shock of being driven out of Greece.
On the seventh day, the 26th, the British commander in Crete reported:
‘in my opinion the limit of endurance has been reached by the troops
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under my command. . .our position here is hopeless’. Coming from such
a stout-hearted soldier as Freyberg, V.C., this verdict was not questioned.
Evacuation began on the night of the 28th, and ended on the night of the
3 1st — the navy suffering heavy losses from the enemy’s dominant air force
in its persistent efforts to bring away as many troops as possible. A total of
16,500 were rescued, including about 2,000 Greeks, but the rest were left
dead or prisoner in German hands. The navy had well over 2,000 dead.
Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk. Thirteen other ships were
badly damaged, including two battleships and the only aircraft-carrier
then in the Mediterranean fleet.
The Germans had some 4,000 men killed, and about twice as many
wounded. Thus their permanent loss was less than a third of what the
British had suffered, apart from the Greeks and local Cretan levies. But,
as the loss fell mostly on the picked troops of Germany’s one existing
parachute division, it had an unforeseen effect on Hitler that turned out
to Britain’s benefit.
For Hitler did not follow up his third Mediterranean victory in any of
the ways expected on the British side — a pounce on to Cyprus, Syria,
Suez or Malta. A month later he launched the invasion of Russia, and
from that time on neglected the opportunities that lay open for driving
the British out of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. If his forfeit
was mainly due to his absorption in the Russian venture, it was also due
to his reaction after the victory in Crete. The cost depressed him more than
the conquest exhilarated him. It was such a contrast to the cheapness of
his previous successes and far larger captures.
Besides the losses in these disasters, the British paid a double forfeit in
Africa. For the pause there allowed time for the arrival in Tripoli of a
German panzer force under Rommel, sent by Hitler to the aid of the col-
lapsing Italians. Although not strong, its swift surprise advance on
31 March sufficed to sweep the British out of Cyrenaica and back to the
frontier of Egypt. Churchill then hustled Wavell to make a hasty fresh
effort, and, when this grandiloquently named ‘ Operation Battleaxe’ failed
in June, he sacked Wavell — who was replaced by Auchinleck.
The image of Rommel now filled Churchill’s eye to the exclusion of all
else. To eject him, Churchill poured most of Britain’s available forces into
Africa. The renewed and enlarged British offensive, called ‘Operation
Crusader’, had been launched on 18 November. This time Churchill’s
efforts had provided the British forces (now entitled the Eighth Army)
with over 750 tanks — more than twice as many as Rommel had, and a
third of his were poorly armed Italian tanks. But the German tanks were
much better handled tactically than the British and a proportion of them
had a heavier gun. Moreover Rommel skilfully manoeuvred to bait the
British into bull-like charges where they were trapped by his concealed
anti-tank guns. In consequence, he was able to turn the tables on his
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opponents in the first few days of the battle, despite their 4 to i superiority
in the air (and the fact that two-thirds of his meagre number of aircraft
were Italian). The way that he hit back threw the attackers into such con-
fusion that the commander of the Eighth Army, General Cunningham,
thought of breaking off the battle. In the crisis Auchinleck flew up from
Cairo to take a personal grip on the situation, and persisted in pressing
the offensive. The Eighth Army was given a new commander, General
Ritchie, and a large number of reinforcing tanks and troops were
brought up. Eventually, after two more weeks of hard struggle, superior
weight prevailed and Rommel’s depleted forces were pushed out of
Cyrenaica.
Now at last, in Christmas week, Rommel received the first small batch
of reinforcements — two tank companies and a few batteries of artillery —
that had reached him since the battle had begun, a month before. With
this aid he repulsed a British attempt, launched on Boxing Day, to storm
the position near Agedabia where he had halted his retreat. Then, on
21 January, he suddenly sprang like a tiger upon opponents who had
assumed him to be badly lamed and too weak to move. His unexpected
pounce and swift series of blows threw the Eighth Army into disorder, and
drove it to abandon most of the ground it had gained. It managed to halt
on the Gazala-Bir Hacheim line, just west of Tobruk.
For that abortive effort to knock out Rommel, Britain paid heavy
penalty (which reacted on her Allies too) — the forfeit of her positions in
the Far East. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, had
emphasised in May that ‘it has been an accepted principle in our strategy
that in the last resort the security of Singapore comes before that of Egypt’.
He had deprecated neglecting the defence of the Far East in favour of an
early offensive in Africa. But Churchill rebuffed the warning, and con-
fidently declared that ‘in any case Japan would not be likely to besiege
Singapore at the outset’ even if she did enter the war.
Churchill’s blind neglect of the Far East defences was the more extra-
ordinary because it had long been an axiom of British policy that if
Japan’s oil supply were cut off by an embargo she would be bound to
strike back. In July that drastic step was taken by Roosevelt and Churchill
simultaneously, to enforce their demand for a Japanese withdrawal from
Indo-China. Yet both Britain and the United States were caught napping
when Japan at last struck on 7 December — and nothing adequate had been
done to strengthen the defence of Singapore during the five months’
interval.
That was a much worse error, and far more serious in its consequences,
than any of which Dill’s successor, Alanbrooke, complained. (Charac-
teristically, Churchill had become impatient of Dill’s doubts and removed
him from office, a week before the Japanese landed on the Malay Penin-
sula in rear of Singapore, thus confirming Dill’s warnings.)
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The only compensation, which eventually outweighed all else, was that
the simultaneous attack by the Japanese on America’s Pacific bases
brought the United States into the war. That in the end proved fatal not
only to Japan but to Hitler.
The German invasion of Russia was launched on 22 June — a day ahead
of Napoleon’s date. The panzer forces quickly overran the Soviet armies
that were immediately available and within less than a month had driven
450 miles into Russia — three-quarters of the way to Moscow. But the
Germans never reached there.
On 3 February 1941 Hitler had approved the final text of the Barba-
rossa plan, after a conference of his military chiefs at Berchtesgaden.
The enemy’s strength in western Russia was estimated at 155 divisions,
including sixty tank brigades. The Germans could muster only 121 divi-
sions, of which seventeen were armoured, for the attack. Moreover the
number of armoured divisions had been raised to that figure only by
halving the scale of tanks in them — a dilution, contrary to the views of the
tank experts, that Hitler decreed to increase the apparent number of such
divisions. The comparative figures did little to allay doubts among the
executive generals.
Hitler’s original timetable was upset by the events in the Balkans (above,
p. 762). He had a deep fear of British intervention in the Balkans, close to
his Rumanian sources of oil supply, and that fear increased after Mussolini
had attacked Greece in October without consulting his partner. Hitler was
very annoyed, and found little consolation in the repulse that the Italians
suffered. For the appearance in Greece of a small instalment of British aid
made it likely that a larger one would follow — and it did. Hitler had gained
a dominating position in the Balkans by inducing Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
in turn to come under his wing, but this did not satisfy him, so he had
decided to occupy Greece as further cover to his Balkan flank, before
invading Russia. The overthrow of the government of Yugoslavia by a
military revolt caused Hitler to make a bigger effort, and detach larger
forces to subdue Yugoslavia simultaneously with Greece. Both were
quickly overrun, and the British were driven to re-embark. But, when
Hitler took the decision, he had felt compelled to put off the invasion of
Russia from mid-May to mid- June. Because of the lateness of the spring
and bad weather, however, he could not have started it until a week or
so earlier.
Hitler and the Army Command had different ideas from the start of the
planning — and never reconciled them.
Hitler wished to secure Leningrad as a primary objective, thus clearing
his Baltic flank and linking up with the Finns, and tended to disparage the
importance of Moscow. But, with a keen sense of economic factors, he
also wanted to secure the agricultural wealth of the Ukraine and the
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industrial area on the Lower Dnieper. The two objectives were extremely
wide apart, and thus entailed entirely separate lines of operation.
Brauchitsch and Haider wanted to concentrate on the Moscow line of
advance — not for the sake of capturing the capital, but because they felt
that this line offered the best chance of destroying the mass of Russia’s
forces which they ‘expected to find on the way to Moscow’. In Hitler’s
view that course carried the risk of driving the Russians into a general
retreat eastward, out of reach.
In the first phase, however, it was agreed that the centre of gravity
should be in the sector of Bock’s Army Group just north of the Pripet
Marshes, and along the route from Minsk and Moscow. Here the major
part of the armoured forces were employed — Bock being given two panzer
groups (of nine panzer and seven motorised divisions) to act as spearheads,
and fifty-one divisions in all.
Leeb’s Army Group on the northern flank, near the Baltic — with one
panzer group (three panzer and three motorised divisions), and thirty
divisions in all — had bare equality to the Russian forces facing it. Rund-
stedt’s Army Group, south of the Pripet Marshes, was given one panzer
group (five panzer and three motorised divisions) and thirty divisions in
all — a total much less than the forces opposing it.
The panzer pincers of Guderian and Hoth quickly made two deep
incisions, and on the sixth day met at Minsk, 200 miles inside the frontier.
Behind them the infantry pincers closed in at Slonim, but they were not
quick enough to complete the encirclement before the bulk of the enveloped
Russian armies forced their way out of the trap.
A second attempt, aimed to surround them near Minsk, was more
successful, and nearly 300,000 were captured — although large fractions
had managed to escape before the encirclement was sealed. The size of the
bag gave rise to a wave of optimism, even among the generals who had
been apprehensive about Hitler’s decision to invade Russia. Haider wrote
in his diary on 3 July: ‘It is probably not an exaggeration when I contend
that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days.’ On that
day Guderian’s leading troops had reached the Dnieper — 320 miles deep
into Russia and half-way to Moscow.
The German higher command then thought it best to wait until their
own infantry masses came up, but that would have meant up to a fort-
night’s delay, so Guderian decided to tackle the Dnieper with his panzer
forces alone. His attack was successful, and, after overcoming the Dnieper
line on 10 July, he reached the city of Smolensk on the 16th and drove
quickly on to the Desna river.
Guderian urged the importance of keeping the Russians on the run,
and allowing them no time to rally. But Hitler reverted to his own original
idea for the next stage of operations. The panzer forces were to be taken
away from Bock, in the centre, and sent to the wings — Guderian’s panzer
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group was to wheel southward to help in overcoming the Russian armies
facing Rundstedt in the Ukraine, while Hoth’s panzer group was to turn
northward to aid Leeb’s attack on Leningrad.
Once again Brauchitsch temporised, instead of at once pressing for a
different plan. He argued that, before any further operations were started,
the panzer forces must have a rest to overhaul their machines and get up
replacements. Meanwhile the high-level discussion about the course to be
followed went on, and it continued even after the panzer forces could have
resumed their drive. None the less, another encirclement, at Kiev, was a
great success, and raised rosy expectations. Guderian thrust downward
across the Russians’ rear while Kleist’s panzer group thrust upward. The
two pincers met 150 miles east of Kiev, closing a trap in which 600,000
Russians were caught. But it was late in September before the battle ended,
as poor roads and rainy weather had slowed down the pace of the encircling
manoeuvre.
The renewed advance on Moscow began on 2 October. Its prospects
looked bright when Bock’s armies brought off a great encirclement round
Vyazma, where a further 600,000 Russians were captured. That left the
Germans momentarily with an almost clear path to Moscow. But the
Vyazma battle had not been completed until the end of October, the
German troops were tired, the country became a morass as the weather
got worse, and fresh Russian forces appeared in the path as they plodded
slowly forward.
Brauchitsch and Haider, as well as Bock, were naturally the more
reluctant to call a halt because of their earlier struggle in getting Hitler to
accept their arguments for capturing Moscow rather than pursuing objec-
tives in the south.
So the push for Moscow was resumed on 1 5 November, when there was
a momentary improvement in the weather. But, after two weeks’ struggle
in mud and snow, it was brought to a halt twenty miles short of Moscow.
On 2 December a further effort was launched, and some detachments
penetrated into the suburbs of Moscow, but the advance as a whole was
held up in the forests covering the capital.
This was the signal for a Russian counter-offensive of large scale,
prepared and directed by Zhukov. It tumbled back the exhausted Germans,
lapped round their flanks, and produced a critical situation.
The forfeit of Moscow was not compensated by what the armies attained
in the south. After the great round-up at Kiev, Rundstedt overran the
Crimea and the Donetz basin, but was frustrated in his drive for the
Caucasian oil-fields. He then wanted to fall back to a good defensive line
on the Mius river, but Hitler forbade such a withdrawal. Rundstedt
replied that he could not comply with such an order, and asked to be
relieved of his command. That was in the first week of December —
simultaneously with the repulse at Moscow.
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The same week Brauchitsch asked to be relieved on grounds of sickness,
the next week Bock did likewise, and a little later Leeb resigned when
Hitler rejected his proposal for a withdrawal on the northern front near
Leningrad. So all the four top commanders departed.
Hitler appointed no successor to Brauchitsch, but took the opportunity
to make himself the direct commander-in-chief of the army.
The Red Army’s winter counter-offensive continued for over three
months after its December launching, though with diminishing progress.
By March it had advanced more than 150 miles in some sectors. But the
Germans maintained their hold on the main bastions of their winter front.
What were the key factors in the German failure?
(i) The autumn mud and winter snow were the obvious ones.
(ii) But more fundamental was the Germans’ miscalculation of the
reserves that Stalin could bring up from the depths of Russia. They
reckoned on meeting 200 divisions, and by mid- August had beaten these.
But by then a further 160 had appeared on the scene. By the time these in
turn had been overcome, autumn had arrived, and, when the Germans
pushed on towards Moscow in the mud, they again found fresh armies
blocking the route.
(iii) Another basic factor was Russia’s continued primitiveness despite
all the technical progress achieved since the Soviet Revolution. It was not
only a matter of the extraordinary endurance of her soldiers and people,
but the primitiveness of her roads. If her road system had been developed
comparably to that of the West, she would have been overrun almost as
quickly as France.
(iv) Even as it was, however, the invasion might have succeeded if the
panzer forces had driven right on for Moscow in the summer, without
waiting for the infantry — as Guderian had urged, only to be overruled on
this occasion by Hitler and the older heads of the army.
The winter in Russia proved a terrible strain and drain on the German
forces — and they never fully recovered from it. Yet it is evident that Hitler
still had quite a good chance of victory in 1942, as the Red Army was
seriously short of equipment, while Stalin’s grip on it had been shaken by
the heavy initial defeats.
Hitler’s new offensive in 1942 swept quickly to the edge of the Caucasus
oil-fields — on which Russia’s military machine depended. But Hitler split
his forces between the double objectives of the Caucasus and Stalingrad.
Narrowly checked here, he wore down his army in repeated bull-headed
efforts to capture the ‘ City of Stalin becoming obsessed with that symbol
of defiance. Forbidding any withdrawal when winter came, he doomed the
army attacking Stalingrad to encirclement and capture when Russia’s
newly raised armies arrived on the scene late in the year.
At the outset the Blitzkrieg tactics had scored once again — but for the
last time. A quick breakthrough was achieved in the Kursk-Kharkov
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sector, and then Kleist’s panzer army poured down the corridor between
the Don and Donetz rivers. Surging through the gateway to the Caucasus,
it reached the more westerly oil-fields round Maikop in six weeks.
This was Russia’s weakest hour. Only an instalment of her newly raised
armies was yet ready for action, and even that was seriously short of
equipment. Fortunately for Russia, the attackers were also much weaker
than in 1941. Hitler tried to fill the gaps with Rumanian, Italian, and
Hungarian troops, using them to cover his long flank — and that substitu-
tion turned into a fatal liability at the end of the year.
When Kleist drove on from Maikop towards the main oil-fields of the
Caucasus he was first halted by r unnin g short of petrol, and then hung up
in the mountains, where he met stiffer resistance as well as a stiffer obstacle.
At the same time his own forces were progressively drained in order
that Hitler might reinforce the divergent attack on Stalingrad. Here, the
first onset was barely checked, but the resistance hardened with repeated
hammering, while the directness of the German strokes simplified the
Russians’ problem in meeting the threat. Hitler could not bear to be
defied by the ‘city of Stalin’, and wore down his forces in the prolonged
effort to storm it. Meanwhile the new Russian armies were gathering on
the flanks.
The counterstroke was launched on 19 November, and was well timed.
It started in the interval between the first strong frosts, which harden the
ground for rapid movement, and the heavy snows, which clog manoeuvre.
North-west of Stalingrad, Russian spearheads thrust down the banks of
the Don to Kalach and the railway running back to the Donetz basin.
South-east of Stalingrad the prongs of the left pincer thrust westward to
the railway running south to Tikhoretsk and the Black Sea. After cutting
this line they pressed on towards Kalach, and by the 23rd the encirclement
was completed. It was welded more firmly in the days that followed,
enclosing over 200,000 of the enemy. General von Paulus’s army attacking
Stalingrad was left isolated.
Meanwhile, another powerful Russian force had burst out of the
Serafimovich bridgehead and spread over the country west of the Don
bend. This outer-circle movement was of vital importance, for it dropped
an iron curtain across the more direct routes by which relieving forces
might have come to the aid of Paulus. Thus the German reply, in mid-
December, was delivered from the south-west, beyond the Don. But this
hastily improvised advance was checked a long way short of the be-
leaguered army, and then gradually forced back by Russian pressure on its
own flank. With the frustration of this attempt any hope of relieving Paulus
passed, for the German Command had no reserves for another attempt.
The disaster at Stalingrad left the Germans with a far longer front than
they could hold with their depleted strength. Withdrawal was the only
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saving course, as the generals urged, but Hitler obstinately refused to
sanction it. Hitler’s forces were suffering, increasingly, the consequences
of strategic overstretch — which had proved the ruin of Napoleon.
The Germans were already paying the penalty of overstretch in the
Mediterranean. The Italians’ breakdown in North Africa had led Hitler
to send German reinforcements there, under Rommel. But, having his
eyes fixed on Russia, Hitler sent only enough to bolster up the Italians,
and never made a strong effort to seize the eastern, central and western
gates of the Mediterranean — Suez, Malta and Gibraltar. So in effect he
merely opened up a fresh drain on Germany’s strength, which ultimately
offset the success of Rommel’s counter-thrusts in postponing for over two
years the clearance of North Africa.
The Germans were now stretched out along both sides of the Medi-
terranean and the whole coast line of western Europe, while trying to hold
a perilously wide front in the depths of Russia.
The same overstretch became a fatal factor for Germany’s new ally.
The Japanese stroke at Pearl Harbour, with naval aircraft, temporarily
crippled the U.S. Pacific fleet, and the immediate sequel was that it
enabled the Japanese to overrun the Allied positions in the south-west
Pacific — Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. In
this rapid expansion, however, they became stretched out far beyond their
basic capacity for holding their gains. For Japan was a small island state,
with limited industrial power.
Initially it had been the British who had paid forfeit for overstretch —
while both they and the Americans had to pay forfeit for being taken by
surprise.
In July 1941 President Roosevelt had sent his personal adviser, Harry
Hopkins, on a mission to London to convey his misgivings about the
wisdom of Churchill’s policy and a warning of the risks involved else-
where — ‘by trying to do too much’ in the Middle East. The American
military and naval experts endorsed the warning, and expressed the view
that Singapore should be given priority over Egypt. None of these argu-
ments altered Churchill’s view. ‘I would not tolerate abandoning the
struggle for Egypt, and was resigned to pay whatever forfeits were exacted
in Malaya.’ But he did not really expect danger there. He says: ‘I confess
that in my mind the whole Japanese menace lay in a sinister twilight,
compared with our other needs.’ It is thus painfully clear that the responsi-
bility for Malaya’s inadequate defences rested principally with Churchill
himself — and was due to his insistence on launching a premature offensive
in North Africa.
The chain of errors did not end there. After the decision to cut off
Japan’s oil supplies, Churchill ‘realised the formidable effects of the
embargoes’, and a month later proposed the dispatch of what he called
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a ‘deterrent’ naval force to the East. The Admiralty were planning to
assemble there the Nelson, the Rodney, and four older battleships, together
with a battle-cruiser and two to three aircraft-carriers. Churchill preferred
to employ ‘the smallest number of the best ships’, and proposed to send
one of the new King George E-type battleships, with a battle-cruiser and
aircraft-carrier, saying: ‘I cannot feel that Japan will face the combination
now forming against her of the United States, Great Britain and Russia. . .
Nothing would increase her hesitation more than the appearance of the
force I mentioned, and above all a K.G. V. This might indeed be a decisive
deterrent.’
Accordingly the Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser Repulse sailed
for Singapore — but without any aircraft-carrier. The one that had been
earmarked ran ashore in Jamaica and had to be docked for repairs. There
was another actually in the Indian Ocean, and within reach of Singapore,
but no orders were given for her to move there. Thus the two big ships
had to depend for air cover upon shore-based fighters and these were
scanty.
The Prince of Wales and Repulse reached Singapore on 2 December.
Five days later a ‘war warning’ signal had been issued to the U.S. Navy
that ‘an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days’.
On 6 December a large Japanese convoy of transports, escorted by
cruisers and destroyers, was reported to be sailing from Indo-China in the
direction of Malaya.
Meanwhile a Japanese naval force (with six carriers) was approaching
Pearl Harbour, in the Hawaiian Islands, the main U.S. naval base in the
Pacific. Early on 7 December the Americans were caught napping by an
attack there. The stroke was made ahead of the declaration of war,
following the precedent of Port Arthur, the Japanese opening stroke in the
war against Russia.
Until early in 1941 the Japanese plan in case of war against the United
States was to use their main fleet in the southern Pacific in conjunction
with an attack on the Philippine Islands, to meet an American advance
across the ocean to the relief of their garrison in the Philippines. That was
the move that the Americans were expecting the Japanese to make, and
their expectation had been reinforced by the recent Japanese move down
to Indo-China. But Admiral Yamamoto had in the meantime conceived
a new plan — of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour. The striking force
made a very roundabout approach via the Kurile Islands and came down
from the north upon the Hawaiian Islands undetected, then launching its
attack before sunrise, with 360 aircraft, from a position nearly three
hundred miles from Pearl Harbour. Four of the eight American battleships
were sunk and the others badly damaged. In a little over an hour the
Japanese had gained control of the Pacific.
Japan’s opening stroke in the south Pacific was equally effective. The
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Japanese invasion convoy crossed the Gulf of Siam unmolested and on the
night of the 7th began disembarking its troops at three points high up the
Malay Peninsula. Next evening Admiral Phillips gallantly sailed north
from Singapore with his two big ships to strike at the transports, although
no shore-based air cover could be provided so far north. Soon after day-
light on the 10th he was caught off Kuantan by a force of some 80 Japanese
bombers and torpedo-bombers from their base at Saigon in Indo-China.
They swooped down on the Prince of Wales and Repulse in nine successive
waves, and both ships were sunk.
By these strokes the way was cleared for an uninterrupted seaborne
invasion of Malaya and the Malay Archipelago. While the main Japanese
striking force had been steaming north-east towards the Hawaiian Islands,
other naval forces had been escorting troopship convoys into the south-
west Pacific. Almost simultaneously with the air attack on Pearl Harbour,
landings began in the Malay Peninsula as well as in the Philippines. The
former were aimed at the great British naval base at Singapore, but there
was no attempt to attack it from the sea — the kind of attack which the
defence had been primarily designed to meet. The approach was very
indirect.
While landings were made at two points on the east coast of the Malay
Peninsula, to seize airfields and distract attention, the main forces were
disembarked on the Siamese neck of the peninsula, some 500 miles north
of Singapore. From these landing-places in the extreme north-east the
Japanese forces poured down the west coast of the peninsula, successively
outflanking the lines on which the British forces attempted to check them.
The Japanese profited not only by their unexpected choice of such a
difficult route but by the opportunities for unexpected infiltration which
the thick vegetation often provided. After almost continuous retreat for
six weeks the British forces were forced to withdraw from the mainland
into the island of Singapore at the end of January. On the night of 8 Feb-
ruary the Japanese launched their attack across the mile-wide straits, got
ashore at numerous points, and developed fresh infiltrations along a
broad front. On 15 February the defending forces surrendered, and with
them was lost the key to the south-west Pacific.
In the main Philippine island of Luzon, the initial landings north of
Manila had been quickly followed by a landing in the rear of the capital.
Under this dislocating leverage, and the converging threat, the American
forces abandoned most of the island and fell back into the small Bataan
Peninsula before the end of December. There, by contrast, they were only
open to frontal assault on a narrowly contracted front, and succeeded in
holding out until April before they were overwhelmed.
Long before that, and even before the fall of Singapore, the Japanese
tide of conquest was spreading through the Malay Archipelago. On
24 January different Japanese forces landed in Borneo, Celebes and New
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Guinea. Three weeks later they launched an attack on Java, the core of the
Dutch East Indies, after the island had been isolated by flanking moves.
Within a further three weeks, the whole of Java had fallen into their hands
like a ripe plum. But the apparently imminent threat to Australia did not
develop.
The main Japanese effort was now directed in the opposite direction,
westwards, towards the conquest of Burma. The direct but wide-fronted
advance from Thailand upon Rangoon was an indirect approach to their
major object on the Asiatic mainland as a whole, the paralysis of China’s
power of resistance. For Rangoon was the port of entry for Anglo-
American supplies of equipment to China, by way of the Burma Road.
At the same time, this move was shrewdly designed to complete the con-
quest of the western gateway to the Pacific, and there establish a firm
barrier across the main routes by which any overland Anglo-American
offensive might subsequently be attempted. On 8 March Rangoon fell,
and within a further two months the British forces were driven out of
Burma, over the mountains, back into India.
The Japanese had thus secured a covering position so strong by nature
that any attempt at reconquest would be badly handicapped and bound
to be a very slow process. A long time passed before the Allies built up
forces sufficient to attempt the recovery of Japan’s conquests — beginning
at the eastern end. Here they benefited from the preservation of Australia,
which provided them with a large-scale base close to the chain of Japanese
outposts.
Once America’s strength developed, and Russia survived to develop
hers, the defeat of the Axis powers — Germany, Italy and Japan — became
certain, as their combined military potential was so much smaller. The
only uncertainties were how long it would take, and how complete it
would be. The most that the aggressors, turned defenders, could hope for
was to obtain better terms of peace by spinning out time until the ‘ giants’
became weary or quarrelled. But the chances of such prolonged resistance
depended on shortening fronts. None of the Axis leaders could bear to
‘lose face’ by voluntary withdrawal, and so clung on to every position
until it collapsed.
The turning-point against Japan came with the Battle of the Coral Sea
in May 1942, and was clinched by the Battle of Midway the next month —
the first naval battles in history where the ships never sighted each other
nor fired a shot. For they were conducted by long-range air action, and
Japan’s loss of five aircraft-carriers in them crippled her sea-air power.
But, although the tide had turned in the Pacific, a long time passed before
the turn became very marked.
It was 7 August 1942 before a strong American naval task force landed
a Marine division at the new Japanese-built base of Guadalcanal in the
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Solomons, and six months passed before the island was completely re-
conquered. That was only after a very tough struggle on land and a series
of naval battles. Meantime the Japanese had landed in New Guinea, and,
although foiled by the Australians in their effort to capture Port Moresby,
on the south coast, they clung on to their westerly footholds until the
summer of 1944 — despite increasing pressure from an Allied force built
up to ten divisions.
From the autumn of 1943 onward, however, the tide had begun to move
faster as General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, on their respective
lines of advance along the chain of islands, developed the method of
bypassing some of the links in the chain, and leaving their garrisons
isolated, while thrusting deeper and deeper into Japan’s outlying rings of
defence. Her overstretch was made fatal by this bypassing strategy.
Against Germany, the tide turned later but moved faster from the
moment of the turn.
The failure of Hitler’s 1942 offensive in Russia — his second gamble on
victory — did not itself produce the disaster which followed in the winter.
The fatal step was Hitler’s obstinate refusal, when winter came, to let
Paulus’s army withdraw from its far-advanced position on the edge of the
Volga at Stalingrad. How the Stalingrad army could have saved itself was
shown by the way that the Caucasus army did save itself, under worse
conditions — for it had pushed much deeper. Although constantly menaced
in flank and rear, Kleist’s army got back to safety through the bottleneck,
while the Russians were held at bay. That long retreat in the depths of
winter was one of the most remarkable feats of extrication from a trap in
all history. Moreover, when the Russian advance approached the Dnieper
in February, after capturing Kharkov, the German armies on the southern
wing mounted and delivered a counter-stroke — under Manstein — which
pierced the hinge of the advance and rolled back the Russian armies in
confusion, recapturing Kharkov.
But this evidence of the defensive capacity which the German armies
still possessed had a too exhilarating effect on Hitler. He would not listen
to arguments for a withdrawal to the Dnieper line, and decided to take
the offensive again in the summer — though the German strength was
much depleted and Russia’s increasing all the time. By contrast, the
Russian army had improved a lot since 1942 both in quality and quantity.
The flow of new equipment had greatly increased as well as the number of
new divisions, and its numerical superiority was now about 4 to 1.
The German offensive was at last launched on 5 July on the Kursk
sector, and into it Hitler threw seventeen armoured divisions — almost all
he had. Both the pincers got entangled in the deep minefields which the
Russians had laid — forewarned by the long preparation of the offensive —
and failed to secure any large bag of prisoners, as the Russians had
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withdrawn their main forces out of reach. On 12 July, as they began to
pull out, the Russians launched their own offensive, which thus had the
recoil-spring effect of a counter-stroke.
In the second half of August the Russian offensive was more widely
extended, and, though it did not make headway very fast, its alternating
strokes kept the scanty German reserves scurrying from sector to sector.
Skilful commanders like Vatutin, Konev, and Rokossovsky were quick
to exploit thin stretches of the broad front. Before the end of September
they had reached the Dnieper and established a wide range of bridgeheads
beyond it. While attention was focused by Vatutin’s threat to the famous
city of Kiev, Konev burst out of his bridgehead at Kremenchug and went
half-way to severing the great bulge formed by the Dnieper Bend. The
Russians’ fresh stroke here reached the mouth of the Dnieper early in
November, closing the exits from the Crimea and isolating the enemy
forces there.
Hitler’s chief consolation was that his northern armies, after falling
back from Smolensk in September to a line covering the Upper Dnieper,
succeeded in repelling five successive Russian offensives between October
and December. The assaults here were mainly delivered astride the
Moscow-Minsk highway. As they came along an obvious line and on a
narrow front, the well-knit defence proved superior despite a numerical
inferiority of about 1 to 6. It showed how Hitler might have spun out the
war if his strategy had been wiser — and less self-exhausting.
But Russia’s survival and her subsequent advance owed much to the
distraction caused by the amphibious flexibility inherent in sea power and
the widespread threat it created. The effect, as revealed by analysis, was
greater than has ever been realised. In 1940 the Germans committed
95 per cent of their strength to the offensive against the West. When they
attacked Russia in 1941 they ventured to use barely 70 per cent of their
strength there — because they felt it was necessary to guard the vast coast
line of the countries they had conquered against the threat of British
seaborne attack.
When that threat was increased by America’s reinforcements and by a
growing scale of assault shipping, the distraction became much larger.
Nearly half the Germans’ strength was drawn away from the Russian
front before the western Allies even set foot in Normandy. Moreover, less
than a quarter of the troops drawn away from Russia were facing the
coming cross-channel attack. Such was the effect of sea power as a threat —
a ubiquitous and incalculable threat of launching an invading force ashore
anywhere along an 8,000 mile stretch of Europe’s coast line.
The turn of the tide in the Mediterranean came earlier than in Russia.
In the spring of 1942 Churchill had again urged early action, pointing out
that the Russians were fighting desperately, and Malta, closer at hand,
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was being reduced to an extremity by Kesselring’s sustained air attack.
But Auchinleck, who had a shrewd sense of the technical and tactical
defects of the British forces, wished to wait until Ritchie’s strength was
raised to a level sufficient to make sure of nullifying Rommel’s superiority
in quality. Finally Churchill, overruling his arguments, decided to send
him definite orders to attack which he ‘must obey or be relieved’.
Rommel, however, struck first. On the moonlight night of 26 May he
passed round the flank of the British position with his three German
divisions, followed by the one Italian armoured and one Italian motorised
division, leaving the four Italian unmotorised divisions to ‘make faces’
at the Gazala line, and the divisions holding it. His flank stroke caught
the British armour ill-positioned, and it came into action piecemeal, and
was badly knocked about.
But despite Rommel’s opening success he did not succeed in cutting
through to the sea, and thus cutting off the divisions in the Gazala line,
as he had hoped. His panzer divisions had a shock on encountering, for
the first time, the Grant tanks with 75 mm guns that America had pro-
vided — 200 of them had already reached the Eighth Army and Rommel
had been unaware of that when launching his attack. He himself says:
4 The advent of the new American tank had tom great holes in our ranks . . .
far more than a third of the German tanks had been lost inside of one day.’
His renewed effort to reach the sea on the second day brought little
progress and more loss. After another abortive day he ordered his striking
force to take up a defensive position. That was a precarious position. For
it lay beyond the fortified British Gazala line, and left him separated
from the rest of his forces by the British garrison and their far-stretching
belt of minefields.
During the days that followed, the British air force rained bombs on
this position, which was aptly christened ‘The Cauldron’, while the
Eighth Army attacked it on the ground. Yet by the night of 1 3 June the
whole outlook had changed. On the 14th Ritchie abandoned the Gazala
line, and started a rapid retreat to the frontier which left the troops in
Tobruk isolated. By the 21st Rommel had captured that fortress and
33,000 men in it, together with an immense amount of stores. It was the
worst British disaster of the war except for the fall of Singapore. Next day
the remainder of the Eighth Army abandoned its position on the frontier
near Solium, and beat a hasty retreat eastward through the desert with
Rommel on its heels.
What had caused such a dramatic tum-about? Rarely has there been
such a tangled battle, and the threads have never been properly unravelled.
The basic clue is to be found in Rommel’s notes : ‘ Ritchie had thrown his
armour into the battle piecemeal and at different times, and had thus
given us the chance of engaging them on each occasion with just enough
of our own tanks. . .’
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Rommel’s calculation worked out all too well. The British persisted in
a series of piecemeal assaults on his position, at heavy cost. Such direct
assaults proved the worst form of caution. While beating them off, he
overwhelmed the isolated ‘box’ at Sidi Muftah held by 150th Infantry
Brigade, which lay behind his back, and cleared a passage through the
minefield for his supplies. He also tackled the still more isolated ‘box’ at
Bir Hacheim on the southern flank that was held by the 1st Free French
Brigade under General Koenig.
Meanwhile the British tank strength had melted from 700 to 170, and
most of the reserve tanks had been used up. In one of his sudden ripostes
Rommel had also captured four regiments of artillery — a very important
bag. He now struck eastward, on 11 June, and cornered most of the
remaining British armour between his two panzer divisions, forcing it to
fight in a cramped area where he could batter it with converging fire. By
nightfall on the 13th it had shrunk to barely 70 tanks. While he had
lost many himself in the three weeks’ battle, he now had an advantage of
more than 2 to 1 in tanks fit for action — and, being in possession of the
battlefield, he could recover and repair many of his damaged tanks, unlike
the British.
Next day, as the British were falling back, Churchill sent an emphatic
message saying: ‘Presume there is no question in any case of giving up
Tobruk.’ He repeated this admonition in telegrams on the 15th and 16th.
That long-distance advice from London conduced to the crowning
blunder. For the hasty step of leaving part of the Eighth Army in Tobruk,
while the rest withdrew to the frontier, gave Rommel the chance to over-
whelm the isolated force in Tobruk before its defence was properly
organised. The consequence of that disaster was the headlong retreat into
Egypt of Ritchie’s surviving force, with Rommel in hot chase. In main-
taining this pursuit Rommel was greatly helped by the huge haul of stores
he had made at Tobruk. General Bayerlein, the Chief of Staff of the
Afrika Korps, stated that 80 per cent of Rommel’s transport at this time
were captured British vehicles!
Ritchie’s intention was to make a stand at Mersa Matruh, and fight out
the issue there with all the forces he had left, reinforced by the New
Zealand Division which was just arriving from Syria. But on the evening
of 25 June Auchinleck took over direct command from Ritchie. After
reviewing the problem, he cancelled the order and decided to fight a more
mobile battle in the Alamein area.
It was a hard decision, for not only did it mean many difficulties in
getting away troops and stores, but it was bound to cause fresh alarm at
home, particularly in Whitehall. In taking the decision, Auchinleck showed
the cool head and strong nerve of a great soldier. It proved fortunate, for
Rommel was racing forward so fast that his spearhead burst through the
front south of Matruh on the 26th and reached the coast road behind.
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But the withdrawal had been ordered just in time, and the bulk of the
encircled troops were able to force their way through before the ring was
firmly welded.
At Alamein, Auchinleck was not content with stopping Rommel, but
sought to turn the tables decisively. How near he came to succeeding is
shown by a letter that Rommel wrote on 18 July — ‘Yesterday was a parti-
cularly hard and critical day. We pulled through again. But it must not
go on like that for long, otherwise the front will crack. Militarily, this is
the most difficult period I have been through.’ Fortunately for Rommel,
the British troops were as exhausted as his own, and soon afterwards
Auchinleck in turn had to suspend his attacks. But Rommel’s closing
reflection was : ‘Although the British losses were higher than ours, yet the
price which Auchinleck had had to pay was not excessive. What mattered
to him was to hold up our advance and that, unfortunately, he had done.’
It is now clear that this first Battle of Alamein was really the turning-point,
although Churchill’s account and war memoirs have obscured the fact.
Moreover, British reinforcements were now streaming into Egypt by sea.
Although Auchinleck had ‘stemmed the adverse tide’, as Churchill
recognised and said, it was not so apparent that the tide had actually
turned as can be seen in retrospect. Rommel still stood barely sixty miles
from Alexandria and the Nile Delta — disturbingly close. Churchill was
already thinking of making a change in the command, and his inclination
turned into decision after finding that Auchinleck strongly resisted his
pressure for an early renewal of the offensive, and insisted that it must be
deferred until September in order to give the new reinforcements time to
become acclimatised and have some training in desert conditions. So, after
further discussion, Churchill telegraphed to the other members of the
War Cabinet in London that he proposed to appoint Alexander as
commander-in-chief, and to give the command of the Eighth Army to
Gott — a surprising choice in the light of this gallant soldier’s fumbling
performance as a corps commander in the recent battles. But Gott was
killed in an air crash next day, on his way to Cairo. Montgomery was then,
fortunately, brought out from England to fill the vacancy.
But an ironical result of these changes was that the resumption of the
British offensive was put off to a much later date than Auchinleck had
proposed.
During August only two fresh formations arrived to reinforce Rommel —
a German parachute brigade and an Italian parachute division. Both came
‘ dismounted’, for employment as infantry. By the eve of the attack, which
Rommel was planning to deliver at the end of August, he had about
200 gun-armed tanks in his two panzer divisions, and 240 in the two
Italian divisions. But the British tank strength at the front had been brought
up to a total of over 700 (of which some 160 were Grants).
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Rommel had to depend on achieving surprise in time and speed. He
hoped that, if he broke through the southern sector quickly, and got astride
the Eighth Army’s communications, it would be thrown off balance and
its defence disjointed. But when the attack was launched, on the night of
30 August, it was found that the mined belt was much deeper than ex-
pected. At daylight, Rommel’s spearheads were only eight miles beyond it.
As a result of Rommel having to wheel north earlier than he had in-
tended, the attack fell directly on the 22nd Armoured Brigade, and on
that alone — but not until late in the day. For continued air attacks, and
the delayed arrival of fuel and ammunition convoys, had such a retarding
effect on the advance that the Afrika Korps did not begin even the
shortened northward wheel until the afternoon. Even when morning came
on 1 September there was still such a shortage of fuel that Rommel was
forced to give up the idea of carrying out any large operation that day.
The diminished attacks of the German armour were successively checked,
by a reinforced defence. The Panzerarmee now had only one day’s fuel
issue left in hand — a quantity sufficient only for about sixty miles move-
ment for its units. So, after a second night of almost continuous bombing,
Rommel decided to break off the offensive, and make a gradual withdrawal.
For the troops of the Eighth Army, the fact of seeing the enemy in
retreat, even though only a few short steps back, far outweighed the
disappointment of failing to cut him off. It was a clear sign that the tide
had turned. Montgomery had already created a new spirit of confidence
in the troops, and their confidence in him was confirmed. Tactically, too,
this battle has a special interest. For it was not only won by the defending
side, but decided by pure defence, without any counter-offensive — or even
any serious attempt to develop a counter-offensive.
Seven weeks passed before the British launched their offensive. An
impatient Prime Minister chafed at the delay, but Montgomery was
determined to wait until his preparations were complete and could be
reasonably sure of success, and Alexander supported him. So Churchill,
whose own position was at this time very shaky after a series of British
disasters since the start of the year, had to bow to their arguments for
putting off the attack until late in October, when the second Battle of
Alamein began.
By that time, the British superiority in strength — both in numbers and
quality — was greater than ever before, the Eighth Army’s fighting strength
being 230,000, while Rommel had less than 80,000, of which only 27,000
were German. More striking still is the comparison in actual tank strength.
When the battle opened the Eighth Army had a total of 1,440 gun-armed
tanks, of which 1,230 were ready for action — while in a prolonged battle
it could draw on some of the further thousand that were now in the base
depots and workshops in Egypt. Rommel had only 260 German tanks
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(of which 20 were under repair, and 30 were light Panzer II’s), and 280
Italian tanks (all of obsolete types) — so that, in terms of reality, the British
started with a 6 to 1 superiority in numbers fit for action, backed by a much
greater capacity to make good their losses. In fighting power, for tank
versus tank action, the British advantage was even greater, since the Grant
tanks were now reinforced by the still newer, and superior, Sherman tanks
that were arriving from America in large numbers. Moreover, Rommel
had lost his earlier advantage in anti-tank guns. In the air, the British
also enjoyed a greater superiority than ever before. This amounted to more
than 1,500 first-line aircraft, whereas the Germans and Italians together
had only some 350 serviceable in Africa to support the Panzerarmee.
But even more important for the issue of the battle was the indirect and
strategic action of the air force, together with the British navy’s sub-
marines, in strangling the Panzerarmee ' s sea-arteries of supply. The
heaviest loss of all was the s inkin g of oil tankers, and none reached
Africa during the weeks immediately preceding the British offensive —
so that the Panzerarmee was left with only three issues of fuel in hand
when the battle opened, instead of the thirty issues which were considered
the minimum reserve required. That severe shortage cramped counter-
manoeuvre in every way.
The loss of food supplies was also an important factor in the spread of
sickness among the troops. The most important ‘sick casualty’ of all was
Rommel himself. He flew back from convalescence in Austria on 25 Octo-
ber — to take charge of a defence which had by then been deeply dented and
had lost nearly half its effective tanks that day in fruitless counter-attacks.
The battle became a process of attrition— of hard slogging rather than
of manoeuvre — and for a time the effort appeared to hover on the brink of
failure. But the disparity of strength between the two sides was so large
that even a very disparate ratio of attrition was bound to work in favour
of Montgomery’s purpose — pressed with the unflinching determination
that was characteristic of him in all he undertook. Within the chosen
limits of his planning, he also showed consummate ability in varying the
direction of his thrusts and developing a tactical leverage to work the
opponent off balance.
The chance of cutting off Rommel, however, was lost because the pursuit
was not sufficiently indirect or extensive in its circling sweep.
Once Rommel had slipped through the jaws of his armoured pursuers,
he did not pause until he had reached his favourite backstop position near
El Agheila at the far end of Cyrenaica — 700 miles back from El Alamein.
But this time the odds against him were too heavy to permit any riposte
or even a long-sustained stand at El Agheila.
A pause of three weeks occurred before the Eighth Army could bring
up its strength and mount an offensive against the El Agheila position.
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Just as the offensive developed, Rommel began to slip off, and, although
a flanking manoeuvre succeeded in cutting off his rearguard, this managed
to break through and get away before the ‘ strategic barrage’ was properly
cemented. Rommel halted again on the Buerat position, a further 200 miles
back. He stayed there three weeks, but, when the Eighth Army closed up
and launched its next offensive, in the middle of January, he fell back
again. This time he made an almost continuous withdrawal for 350 miles,
past Tripoli, to the Mareth line inside the frontier of Tunisia. His decision
was the consequence not merely of his weakness of force and the sinking
of the majority of his supply-ships, but of the new situation produced by
the Anglo-American invasion of Morocco and Algeria in November under
Eisenhower. That move had closely followed the El Alamein offensive,
some 2,500 miles distant at the other end of North Africa.
The landings near Algiers reduced the distance from Bizerta to barely
400 miles. At that moment, a mere handful of motorised troops could have
run through to Bizerta and Tunis without hindrance except from the moun-
tain roads. Alternatively, either seaborne or airborne landings nearby
would have met scarcely any opposition. But the naval authorities were
chary of attempting even small-scale landings so far ahead of air cover,
and the overland advance was too cautious. Meantime, the Germans’
reaction was swift, though the landings had taken them by surprise. From
the third day onwards they began to rush troops to Tunis in all available
troop-carrying aircraft, as well as in small coasting vessels. Although the
total was still small, it was just sufficient to check the leading troops of the
Allied First Army when these reached the immediate approaches to Tunis
two and a half weeks after the initial landings.
The result of this check was a five months’ deadlock in the mountainous
arc covering Bizerta and Tunis. Nevertheless, this failure worked out to
the Allies’ advantage in the long run. For it encouraged the enemy to
continue pouring reinforcements across the sea to Tunisia, where the
Allies could cut off their supplies through developing the stranglehold of
superior sea power, and then cut off their retreat.
The 1943 campaign in Tunisia had opened, however, with a German
counter-stroke that gave the Allies a bad shock. It came just when their
two armies — the First from the west, and the Eighth from the east —
seemed about to crunch the Axis forces between their jaws. The Axis
command aimed to forestall that danger by dislocating both jaws, and
for such an aim the conditions had become more favourable than was
apparent on the surface of the situation. By now the reinforcements sent
to Tunis had been built up into an army, under General von Arnim, while
at the same time the remnant of Rommel’s army was acquiring fresh
strength, and equipment, as it came nearer to the supply ports in its
westward retreat.
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The American 2nd Corps (which included a French division) was the
immediate target of the counter-stroke. Its front covered 90 miles, but was
focused on the three routes through the mountains to the sea, with spear-
heads at the passes near Gafsa, Faid and Fondouk. At the end of January,
the 2 1 st Panzer Division made a sudden spring at the Faid Pass, over-
whelmed the French garrison before American support arrived, and thus
gained a sally-port. On 14 February the real blow came, starting with
a fresh spring forward from the Faid Pass. Opening out as the American
armour came forward to meet it, the 21st Panzer Division pinned the
Americans in front, turned their left flank, and drove round their right
flank to catch them in the rear. The Americans, however, had collected
in strength on the line of approach to Thala, and held on so stubbornly to
the Kasserine Pass that the Germans did not break through it until the
evening of the 20th. Next day they drove into Thala, exhausted, and were
pushed out by the British reserves that had now arrived there. So on the
22nd the Germans, realising that their chance had passed, broke off the
attack and began a gradual withdrawal.
Until 26 February Montgomery had got only one division forward
facing the Mareth line. For once he was worried, and his staff worked
feverishly to redress the balance before the blow came. By 6 March, when
Rommel struck, Montgomery had quadrupled his strength — besides 400
tanks he had now over 500 anti-tank guns in position. Thus in the interval
Rommel’s chance of striking with superior force had vanished. The attack
was brought to a standstill by the afternoon and the Germans’ loss of
fifty tanks was a serious handicap in the next phase of the campaign. By
then they had also lost Rommel, who had gone back to Europe, sick and
frustrated.
The Eighth Army’s attack on the Mareth line was launched on the
night of 20 March. The main blow was a frontal one, intended to break
through the defence near the sea and make a gap through which the
armoured divisions could sweep. At the same time, the New Zealand corps
made a wide outflanking march towards El Hamma in the enemy’s rear,
with the aim of pinning down the enemy’s reserves that were placed there.
The frontal attack failed to make an adequate breach. So, after three days’
effort, Montgomery changed his plan, side-stepping inland and sending
the 1st Armoured Division to follow up the New Zealanders’ threat to the
enemy’s rear.
Then, in the early hours of 6 April, the Eighth Army attacked the Wadi
Akarit under cover of pitch darkness. That tactical innovation resulted in
a penetration, though the exploitation was checked by the Germans when
daylight came. The rapidity of the retreat from the Wadi Akarit, and its
success in evading the Allied attempts at interruption, gave the Germans
a chance to evacuate their forces to Sicily, if they had chosen that course.
The Supreme Command, however, was led to attempt a prolongation of
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the campaign in Africa, rather than draw in its horns and base its defence
of Europe upon the southern shores of Europe. Even in Tunisia it tried
to hold too extensive a front for its resources — a ioo-mile perimeter — in
the endeavour to preserve both Tunis and Bizerta. Stretched between
those two ‘ horns of a dilemma it provided the Allies with an ideal oppor-
tunity to exploit the advantage of having alternative objectives.
Before playing his hand, Alexander reshuffled his cards. On 20 April the
offensive was opened by the Eighth Army with an attack on the enemy’s
left flank. But the coastal corridor became very narrow beyond Enfidaville,
and the advance soon slowed down, coming to a halt on the 23rd.
Meantime Alexander again reshuffled his hand. Leaving only a screen-
ing force in the right centre near Goubellat, he moved the bulk of the
9th Corps over to the left centre, concentrated it behind the 5th Corps,
and reinforced it with two picked divisions from the Eighth Army —
the 7th Armoured and 4th Indian. Amim had little chance of perceiving
the deception, or of readjusting his dispositions after the blow fell, because
of the Allies’ command of the air. The highly concentrated assault of the
9th Corps, now under General Horrocks, was launched in the starlit
but moonless early hours of 6 May. The stunned defenders of the gateway
were soon overrun by the infantry of the 4th Indian and 4th British
Divisions. The overstretched defence was not only thin but had little
depth. Then the concentrated tanks of the 6th and 7th Armoured Divisions
drove through the breach. But they lost time in dealing with various small
pockets of German resistance. By nightfall they had only advanced a few
miles beyond the breach and were still some fifteen miles from Tunis.
Next morning, however, it became clear that the opposing army as a
whole was still paralysed by the combined air shock and strategic shock
to such an extent that it could not develop any tactical counter-measures.
By the afternoon the leading troops of the British armoured divisions had
swept into Tunis. The 6th then turned south, while the 7th turned north,
to spread dislocation. Almost simultaneously, the Americans and French
poured into Bizerta. Enemy resistance dramatically collapsed on the
northern half of the front. The enemy command had been caught off its
balance, and then its machine was thrown out of gear by the combination
of air pressure overhead and tank impact on its back. Dislocation of
control was the primary cause of collapse, while the breakdown of com-
munications accentuated the demoralising effect of lack of reserves and
disruption of supplies. Another factor was the closeness of the enemy’s
bases to the broken front. That deepened the depressing sensation of
fighting with their back to the sea — a sea now dominated by the Allies’
sea power and air power.
The resulting ‘ bag ’ of the whole German-Italian army in Africa cleared
the way for the Allies’ re-entry into Europe — which might otherwise have
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been blocked. The success of their follow-up landing in Sicily in July pro-
duced the downfall of Mussolini and the quickly following surrender of
Italy. That in turn cleared the Allies’ path to the Italian mainland in early
September. But the Germans were quicker in reacting to the emergency
than the Allies were in exploiting the opportunity, and their advance up
the mountainous peninsula became sticky and slow. The German generals,
under Kesselring, ably made the most of the obstacles, while the Allied
generals showed much less ability to overcome them — though Guillaume’s
handling of the French corps was a shining exception.
Significantly, the distracting effect caused by the Allies’ amphibious
flexibility diminished when the ubiquitous threat was translated into an
actual landing. By June 1944 they were employing in Italy a strength in
troops double that of Kesselring. That was not a good investment pro-
portionately, and justified the American argument for breaking off the
offensive there after the strategic airfields in the south were gained. More-
over, its continuance did not draw German reserves away from Normandy,
nor prevent them reinforcing Normandy, as the British hoped — and have
claimed.
The only claim that can be made for the strategic effect of the Italian
campaign, as an aid to the success of the Normandy landing, is that with-
out its pressure the German strength on the Channel front might have
been increased even more. The scale of the assault and immediate follow-
up forces there was limited by the number of landing craft available, so
that the Allied forces employed in Italy could not have added to the weight
of the Normandy landing during its crucial opening phase.
On 6 June 1944 the main Allied armies, which had been built up in
England for a cross-Channel invasion, landed in Normandy. Here success
was certain if they could firmly establish themselves ashore in a bridgehead
big enough to build up their massed strength and swamp the Germans’
barricading line. For, once they broke out, the whole width of France
would be open for the manoeuvre of their armies, which were fully mechan-
ised, whereas the bulk of the German forces were still on a horse-
transport basis.
The Germans’ defence was thus doomed to eventual collapse unless they
could throw the invaders back in the sea in the first few days. But in the
event the move-up of their panzer reserves was fatally delayed by the
paralysing interference of the Allied air forces, which had a 30 to 1 superi-
ority over the Luftwaffe in this theatre.
Even if the invasion of Normandy had been repulsed on the beaches,
the Allies’ now tremendous air superiority, applied direct against Germany,
would have made her collapse certain. For, even if the will to fight had
survived the increasingly intense bombardment, organised resistance would
have become impossible — through the paralysis of communications and
the destruction of essential supplies.
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Until 1944 the strategic air offensive had fallen far short of the claims
made for it, as an alternative to land invasion, and its effects had been
greatly overestimated. The indiscriminate bombing of cities had not
seriously diminished munitions production, while failing to break the will
of the opposing peoples and compel them to surrender, as expected. For
collectively they were too firmly under the grip of their tyrannical leaders,
and individuals could not surrender to bombers in the sky.
But in 1944-5 air power was better directed. Besides cramping and often
paralysing the counter-moves of the German armies, it was applied with
ever-increasing precision and crippling effect to the key centres of war
production that were vital to the enemy’s power of resistance. In the Far
East, too, the master key of air power made the collapse of Japan certain,
without any need for the atom bomb.
The main obstacle in the Allies’ path, once the tide had turned, was a
self-raised barrier — their leaders’ unwise and short-sighted demand for
‘unconditional surrender’. It was the greatest help to Hitler, in preserving
his grip on the German people, and likewise to the war-party in Japan.
If the Allied leaders had been wise enough to provide some assurance as
to their peace terms, Hitler’s grip on the German people could have been
loosened long before 1945.
Three years earlier, envoys of the widespread anti-Nazi movement in
Germany made known to the Allied leaders their plans for overthrowing
Hitler, and the names of the many leading soldiers who were prepared to
join such a revolt, provided that they were given some assurance about
the Allied peace terms. But then, and later, no indication or assurance
was given them, so that it naturally became difficult for them to gain
support for a ‘leap in the dark’.
Thus ‘the unnecessary war’ was unnecessarily prolonged, and millions
more living needlessly sacrificed, while the ultimate peace merely produced
a fresh menace and the looming cloud of another war. For the unnecessary
prolongation of the war, in pursuit of the opponents’ ‘unconditional
surrender’, proved of profit only to Stalin — by opening the way for Com-
munist domination of central Europe.
Under the shield of a vastly superior air power the Allies’ footholds in
Normandy were soon expanded into a large bridgehead, eighty miles
wide. Although the German army managed to keep them penned in there
for nearly two months it was never able to deliver any dangerous counter-
stroke.
On 25 July the U.S. First Army launched a fresh offensive, ‘Cobra’,
while the recently landed Patton’s Third Army was ready to follow it up.
The last German reserves had been thrown in to stop the British thrusts
near Caen, on the west. On the 31st the American spearhead burst through
the front at Avranches, on the other wing. Pouring through the gap, its
tanks quickly flooded the open country beyond.
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The bulk of the German forces in the west had been thrown into the
Normandy battle, and kept there by Hitler’s ‘no withdrawal’ orders until
they collapsed — and a large part were trapped. The fragments were in-
capable of further resistance for the time being, and their retreat — largely
on foot — was soon outstripped by the British and American mechanised
columns.
On 31 August the spearheads of Patton’s army crossed the Meuse at
Verdun, a hundred miles to the south. Next day, patrols pushed on un-
opposed to the Moselle near Metz, thirty-five miles farther east. There
they were barely thirty miles from the great industrial area of the Saar on
the German frontier, and less than a hundred miles from the Rhine.
But the main bodies could not immediately follow up this advance as they
had run out of fuel.
On 3 September one armoured spearhead of the British Second Army
swept into Brussels — after a seventy-five mile drive through Belgium from
its morning starting-point in northern France. Next day another drove on
to Antwerp and captured the vast docks undamaged before the surprised
German base units had a chance to carry out any demolitions. There it
was less than 100 miles from the Rhine, at the point of entry into the
Ruhr, Germany’s greatest industrial area. If the Ruhr was captured Hitler
could not maintain the war. That same day the spearheads of the U.S.
First Army captured Namur, on the Meuse. On this flank there was now a
gap a hundred miles wide facing the British. No German forces were yet
at hand to fill it. Rarely in any war has there been such an opportunity.
But, just as complete victory appeared within easy reach, the Allies’
onrush petered out. By mid-September the Germans had thickened up
their defence all along the front, and above all on the most northerly
sector. That was the more unfortunate since Montgomery was now mount-
ing another big thrust there, to the Rhine at Arnhem, on 17 September.
In this he was planning to drop the recently formed Allied Airborne Army
to clear the path. This thrust was checked by the enemy before it reached
its goal, and a large part of the British airborne troops, dropped at
Arnhem, were cut off and compelled to surrender.
The next month was spent by the U.S. First Army in grinding down the
defences of Aachen, while Montgomery brought up the First Canadian
Army to clear out the two ‘pockets’ of Germans which commanded the
passage up the Scheldt estuary to Antwerp, and thus blocked the use of the
port. Clearing these pockets proved a painfully slow process, which was
not completed until early in November. Meanwhile the German build-up
along the front covering the Rhine was progressing faster than that of the
Allies, despite Germany’s inferiority in material resources. In mid-
November a general offensive was launched by all six Allied armies on the
western front. It brought disappointingly small gains, at heavy cost.
After that, the Germans were even able to stage a powerful counter-
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offensive before Christmas, in the Ardennes, with two panzer armies.
It took the U.S. First Army by surprise, broke through the front and
almost reached the Meuse, causing great alarm and confusion before
being checked. Then Montgomery and Patton closed in and squeezed
out the bulge it had made.
The price that the Allied armies paid for the missed opportunity in early
September was heavy. Out of three-quarters of a million casualties which
they suffered in liberating western Europe, half a million were after
their September check. The cost to the world was much worse — millions
of men and women died as a result of that extension of the war. Moreover,
in September the Russian tide had not yet penetrated into central Europe.
On the eastern front, the dominant factor in the campaign of 1944 was
that the German front remained as wide as ever, while the German forces
were shrinking. As a natural result the Russian advance continued with
little check except from its own supply problem — and, owing to the
Russians’ simpler requirements, that problem was less of a handicap
than in any other great national army. The Russians’ summer offensive
was launched on 23 June, north of the Pripet Marshes, soon sweeping the
Germans out of Belorussia and north-east Poland. On 14 July the next
stroke came, south of the Marshes. By the end of the month the Russians
also reached the Gulf of Riga, while in the centre they penetrated to the
suburbs of Warsaw, and the Polish ‘underground’ leaders there were
encouraged to give the signal for a rising.
It was a moment of general crisis for the Germans. In the west their
front in Normandy was collapsing, while their rear was shaken by the
repercussions of the plot to kill Hitler and the purge that followed. But an
astonishing rally came in August, beginning at Warsaw. Three S.S.
armoured divisions arrived at the crucial moment, and delivered a counter-
stroke which threw back the Russian advance forces. This gave the Ger-
mans a breathing space in which to suppress the Polish rising. But the
change was not confined to that sector — for by the end of the first week
of August the Russians were held up almost everywhere. They had
advanced up to 450 miles in five weeks — the longest and fastest advance
they had yet achieved. They were now suffering the natural effect of over-
stretching their communications, and had to bow to that strategic law.
Six months were to pass on the Vistula before they were ready to mount
a fresh drive.
The temporary deadlock was broken by a change of direction — a new
Russian move in the south, on the Rumanian front. Rumania quickly
capitulated, Bulgaria was then overrun, and the Russians pushed through
the Transylvanian Alps into Hungary.
At the opening of 1945 the western half of Poland was still in Germany’s
grip, but the Russian High Command was now well prepared to exploit
the fundamental weaknesses of the German situation. The mounting
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stream of American trucks had enabled them to motorise a much larger
proportion of their infantry brigades, and thus, with the increasing pro-
duction of their own tanks, to multiply the number of armoured and
mobile corps for exploiting a breakthrough. At the same time, the new
Stalin tanks strengthened their punch.
The Russian offensive opened on 12 January, when Konev’s armies
were launched against the German front in southern Poland. After they
had pierced the enemy’s defence, and produced a flanking menace to the
central sector, Zhukov’s armies bounded forward from their bridgeheads
nearer Warsaw. That same day, the 14th, Rokossovsky’s armies struck
north into East Prussia. At the end of the first week the offensive had been
carried 100 miles deep, and was also 400 miles wide by now — far too wide
to be filled by such scanty reinforcements as were belatedly provided.
By 31 January Zhukov’s mechanised forces reached the Lower Oder, only
40 miles from Berlin. But the Germans’ defence benefited from being driven
back to the straight and shortened line formed by the Lower Oder and the
Neisse. On this line their front was barely a quarter of its former width —
less than 200 miles from the Baltic to the Bohemian mountain-frontier.
That great reduction of the space to be covered went far to balance their
loss of strength. By the third week of February the front in the east was
stabilised, with the aid of German reinforcements brought from the west
and from the interior.
Although the Russians were balked, it was the menace of their immi-
nent approach to Berlin that led Hitler to decide that most of his fresh
drafts must be sent to reinforce the Oder, whatever the risk to the defence
of the Rhine. The way was thus eased for the passage of the Rhine by the
American and British armies.
By 21 March Patton had swept the west bank clear of the enemy along
a seventy-mile stretch between Coblenz and Mannheim, cutting off" the
German forces in that sector before they could withdraw to the Rhine.
Next night, Patton’s troops crossed the river almost unopposed. By this
time Montgomery had completed his elaborate preparations for the grand
assault on the Rhine near Wesel, a hundred and fifty miles downstream.
Here he had concentrated 25 divisions. The thirty-mile stretch of river
where he planned to attack was held by only 5 weak and exhausted Ger-
man divisions. On the night of 23 March the attack was launched after
a tremendous bombardment by over 3,000 guns, and by successive waves
of bombers. The leading infantry, supported by amphibious tanks, crossed
the river and established bridgeheads, meeting little resistance.
When the advance developed, much the most serious hindrance came
from the heaps of rubble created by the excessive bombing efforts of the
Allied air forces, which had thereby blocked the routes of advance far
more effectively than the enemy could. For the dominant desire of the
Germans now, both troops and people, was to see the British and American
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armies sweep eastwards as rapidly as possible to reach Berlin and occupy
as much of the country as they could before the Russians overcame
the Oder line. Few of them were inclined to assist Hitler’s purpose of
obstruction by self-destruction.
As the end drew near, Hitler’s illusions continued to grow, and he
counted on some miracle to bring salvation almost until the last hour.
On 12 April the news reached Hitler that President Roosevelt had died
suddenly. Goebbels telephoned him, and said : ‘ My Fiihrer, I congratulate
you. Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us.’
This was the ‘miracle’, it seemed, for which Hitler had been waiting —
a repetition of the death of the empress of Russia at the critical moment
of the Seven Years War in the eighteenth century. So Hitler became con-
vinced that the Alliance between the Eastern and Western powers would
now break up through the clash of their rival interests. The hope was not
fulfilled and Hitler was driven a fortnight later to kill himself — as
Frederick the Great had been about to do, just when his ‘miracle’ had
come to save his fortune and his life.
Early in March Zhukov had enlarged his bridgehead over the Oder,
but did not succeed in breaking out. Russian progress on the far flanks
continued, and Vienna was entered early in April. Meanwhile the German
front in the west had collapsed, and the Allied armies there were driving
eastward from the Rhine with little opposition. They reached the Elbe,
60 miles from Berlin, on II April. Here they were halted by top-level
decision. On the 16th Zhukov resumed the offensive, in conjunction with
Konev, who forced the crossings of the Neisse. This time the Russians
burst out of their bridgeheads, and within a week were driving into the
suburbs of Berlin — where Hitler had chosen to remain for the final battle.
By the 25th the city had been completely isolated by the encircling armies
of Zhukov and Konev, and on the 27th Konev’s forces joined hands with
the Americans on the Elbe. But in Berlin itself desperate street-by-street
resistance was put up by the Germans, and was not completely overcome
until the war itself ended, after Hitler’s suicide, with Germany’s un-
conditional surrender.
The war in Europe came to an end officially at midnight on 8 May 1945,
but in reality that was merely the formal recognition of a finish which had
taken place piecemeal during the previous week. On 2 May all fighting had
ceased on the southern front in Italy, where the surrender document had
actually been signed three days earlier still. This, the first of the three
official acts of surrender, was the most significant, for it was signed while
Hitler still lived, and in disregard of his authority. Moreover it was the
conclusion to ‘backstairs’ surrender moves which had started on that
front nearly two months before.
On 2 September the representatives of Japan signed the ‘instrument of
surrender’ on board the United States’ battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
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The second world war was thus ended six years and one day after it had
been started by Hitler’s attack on Poland — and four months after Ger-
many’s surrender. It was a formal ending, a ceremony to seal the victors’
satisfaction. For the real ending had come on 14 August, when the
emperor had announced Japan’s surrender on the terms laid down by
the Allies, and fighting had ceased — a week after the dropping of the first
atomic bomb. But even that frightful stroke, wiping out the city of
Hiroshima to demonstrate the overwhelming power of the new weapon,
had done no more than slightly hasten the moment of surrender. This
surrender was already sure, and there was no real need to use a weapon
under whose dark shadow the world has lived ever since.
By the spring of 1945 Japan was palpably incapable of checking the
Americans’ two-pronged Pacific counter-offensive. In January MacArthur’s
forces had completed the conquest of Leyte Island, their first foothold in
the Philippines, and made another jump forward — on to the main island
of Luzon. By the end of February they had regained most of this great
island along with the capital, Manila. More important than the recapture
of territory was the wearing down of Japanese air strength in the struggle —
their loss was estimated as more than 9,000 aircraft. It heavily drained the
fighter strength available for the defence of Japan, and was the more
important because Admiral Nimitz’s forces, making another leap forward,
had captured the Marianas in the summer of 1944 — thus enabling airfields
to be established from which heavy bombers could develop a bombard-
ment of Japan, 1,500 miles beyond.
The Japanese hold on Burma had also been broken— by the converging
pressure of the forces, predominantly British, under Admiral Mount-
batten’s command. Following the repulse of the Japanese invasion of
India in 1944, Slim’s Fourteenth Army advanced into central Burma, re-
gaining the city of Mandalay in March 1945. Then it drove on south,
opening the road to Rangoon.
Meanwhile the Americans had made another big leap forward, by-
passing Formosa. On 1 April they landed on Okinawa, one of the Ryukyu
islands, midway between Formosa and Japan. The shock of that news,
coupled with the Russians’ ominous notice of terminating their neutrality
pact with Japan, precipitated the fall of Koiso’s Cabinet on 5 April, and
Suzuki then became Prime Minister. Okinawa was not finally cleared
until mid-June, but its fate had been sealed in the first week, when Japan’s
last and latest modem battleship, the Yamato, had been sunk by American
aircraft on 7 April after sallying forth from Japan in an attempt to inter-
vene. This was a forlorn hope, for there were no aircraft carriers left to
escort the Yamato after the loss of four in the October battle off the
Philippines.
It was evident that, once the island was captured, the Americans would
soon be able to intensify their air bombardment of Japan itself, as the
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airfields were within less than 400 miles of Japan — barely a quarter of the
distance from the Marianas. Terrific damage had already been inflicted by
the bombing attacks from the Marianas — the effect being much increased
since the spring when the Americans largely changed over from high-
altitude attacks in daylight with high explosive to lower-level night attacks
with incendiary bombs. In a single night’s attack, on 9 March, over
1,600 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the capital, Tokyo, and
some 15 square miles of the city were burnt out, while 185,000 people were
killed or injured. By the end of May three million of Tokyo’s population
had been rendered homeless, and by August over nine million altogether
in the 66 cities selected for destruction.
The hopelessness of the situation was plain to any strategical mind, but
Admiral Suzuki and his peace-seeking Cabinet were entangled in a knotty
problem. Acceptance of the Allies’ demand for ‘unconditional surrender’
would appear like a betrayal of the forces in the field, who might refuse
to obey a ‘cease fire’ order if there was any demand for the removal of the
emperor, who in their eyes was not only their sovereign but also divine.
It was the emperor himself who moved to cut the knot. On 20 June he
summoned to a conference the six members of the inner Cabinet, the
Supreme War Direction Council, and there told them: 4 You will consider
the question of ending the war as soon as possible.’ Eventually it was
decided that Prince Konoye should be sent on a mission to Moscow to
negotiate for peace — and the emperor privately gave him instructions to
secure peace at any price.
The Americans became independently aware of Japan’s desire to end
the war, for their intelligence service intercepted and read — by the cipher-
breaking means called * Magic’— -the messages from the Japanese Foreign
Minister to the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow. But President Truman
and most of his chief advisers were now as intent on using the atomic
bomb to accelerate Japan’s collapse as Stalin was on entering the war
against Japan before it ended, in order to gain an advantageous position
in the Far East.
There were some who felt doubts, and among them was Admiral Leahy,
Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt and President Truman successively,
who recoiled from the idea of employing such a weapon against the civilian
population — ‘ My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had
adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Age’.
But the scientists who were closest to the statesmen’s ears had a better
chance of gaining attention, and their eager arguments prevailed in the
decision — aided by the enthusiasm which they had already excited in the
statesmen about the atomic bomb, as a quick and easy way of finishing the
war. So on 6 August the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
destroying most of the city and killing some 80,000 people — a quarter of its
inhabitants. Three days later the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
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The news of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb reached President
Truman as he was returning by sea from the Potsdam Conference.
According to those present he exultantly exclaimed : ‘ This is the greatest
thing in history.’ The effect on the Japanese government, however, was
much less than was imagined on the Western side at the time. Russia’s
declaration of war on 8 August, and immediate drive into Manchuria next
day, seems to have been almost as effective in hastening the issue, and the
emperor’s influence still more so. Meantime the government announced
by radio its willingness to surrender provided that the emperor’s sovereignty
was respected— a point about which the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration
of 26 July had been ominously silent. After some discussion President
Truman agreed to this proviso, a notable modification of ‘ unconditional
surrender’.
Why then was the bomb used? Stalin’s demand at Potsdam to share in
the occupation of Japan was very embarrassing, and the U.S. government
was anxious to avoid such a contingency. A second reason was revealed
by Admiral Leahy: The scientists and others wanted to make this test
because of the vast sums that had been spent on the project — two billion
dollars. One of the higher officers concerned in the atomic operation, the
code name of which was the ‘Manhattan District Project’, put the point
still more clearly: ‘The bomb simply had to be a success — so much money
had been expended on it. . .The relief to everyone concerned when the
bomb was finished and dropped was enormous.’
Twenty years later, however, it is all too clear that the hasty dropping
of the atomic bomb has not been a relief to the rest of mankind.
Much the worst of the Allies’ military errors were before the United
States was brought into the war, by Japan’s colossal misjudgement — and
especially those of the first nine months. But the ‘unconditional surrender’
policy not only tended to prolong the war and its exhausting effect but
was fatal to the prospects of a good and stable peace. Although it has
the appearance of a political error, it was really a basic error in grand
strategy. The direct responsibility for it was due to Roosevelt and Churchill,
but their adoption of such an unwise and short-sighted demand was
supported by popular emotion, while their strategic advisers failed to raise
any objections to the foolish formula until experience brought proof of
its drawbacks. In the end it was tacitly abandoned when dealing with
Japan.
No great military errors were made on the Allied side in the years from
1942 to 1945, following America’s entry into the war. The wrangles of the
generals, in their memoirs, are largely over secondary matters which made
no great difference to the issue — and it is very doubtful whether the alter-
native courses that some of them favoured would have done much to
shorten the war or diminish its cost.
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It was the combination of superior industrial power and superior
material resources with sea power that turned the tide and settled the
issue. Generalship had no great effect in accelerating the tide. At the best,
it was competent in developing a leverage, and careful in avoiding the
extravagantly futile sacrifice of life that had exhausted the armies
and the manhood of nations in the first world war. But it was never
masterly — in the real sense of the term. The few generals on the Allied
side who showed flashes of brilliance were also those most apt to commit
blunders.
It is evident, too, that some of the generals have claimed, or let their
protagonists claim for them, more than their due — and also have com-
plained about their allies more than is justified.
Alanbrooke’s claim, as voiced by Bryant, 1 is that he conceived the
strategy that won the war, induced the Americans to follow it, and that
its purpose was ‘to make possible a simultaneous attack from across the
Channel and from Russia’ that Hitler would be unable to counter, by
‘drawing and keeping his strategic reserves south of the Alpine ranges’.
Bryant also asserts that Alanbrooke formulated this strategy, and ‘fore-
cast’ its course, on becoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff in
December 1941. But Alanbrooke’s own diary provides no evidence that
any such far-sighted, comprehensive and subtle design was in his mind.
Instead, it shows that his main purpose then was simply to reopen the
Mediterranean as a traffic route to the Far East.
Close examination of Alanbrooke’s diary also shows that he was slow
to grasp, and dubious about, further developments in the Mediterranean
area. In June 1942 he was opposed to Roosevelt’s and Churchill's pro-
jected landing in French North Africa, doubting both its practicability
and its value, although he came round subsequently to accept the plan.
When the landings succeeded, his diary streams with criticism that the
advance to Bizerta and Tunis was not being pushed faster, and for this
it blames Eisenhower. His criticism of the slow pace was justified, tacti-
cally. But it shows that he had not developed any such subtle luring
strategy as is now claimed. For the slowness of the advance became the
unintended means of drawing Hitler and Mussolini to pour large reinforce-
ments into Tunisia — where Allied sea power isolated the Axis forces and
compelled their surrender in May 1943.
That huge ‘bag’ left Sicily stripped of forces to defend it, and only this
naked state made possible the successful invasion of Sicily and Italy on
which Alanbrooke had set his mind. Moreover, during the previous
winter he had been in conflict with the American Chiefs of Staff, headed
by General Marshall, who wanted to close down operations in the Medi-
terranean in order to launch the cross-Channel attack against Normandy
in 1943. Ironically, it was the slow progress of their advance into
1 Sir Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West, 1943-46 (1959), p. 197.
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Tunisia that nullified the Allies’ hopes and led them to agree that the
next move should be against Italy — as Alanbrooke desired — since it was
now too late to mount the cross-Channel attack that year. It was the logic
of events resulting from loss of time, more than logic of argument, that
swung the Allied strategy towards the invasion of Italy. But, although
Alanbrooke’s wish was conceded, his hopes were soon disappointed again
by the slow progress after the landing, and he vented his disappointment
in renewed criticism of the American leaders.
The memoirs of American generals, on the other hand, express doubts
about Alanbrooke’s and Churchill’s wholehearted acceptance of the
adopted plan that the invasion of Italy in 1943 should be followed by the
invasion of France in 1944. Their doubts, and their suspicions that the
British were hoping to sidetrack the cross-Channel venture, will be re-
kindled by a number of entries in Alanbrooke’s diary. As late as October
1943 he records the receipt of a note from Churchill ‘wishing to swing the
strategy back to the Mediterranean at the expense of the Channel ’ — and
remarks : ‘ I am in many ways entirely with him.’ The following week he
records that Churchill argued the case for the Mediterranean ‘as opposed
to’ the cross-Channel attack, and himself terms the latter ‘very problem-
atical’. While recognising that the Americans would strongly object to
putting it off again, or to any Balkan move, he remarks: ‘I am tired of
seeing our strategy warped by their shortsightedness.’
The British strategic plan, however, received a bad knock at the
Teheran Conference at the end of November, through Stalin’s reinforce-
ment of the American arguments against it. That was ominous, and ironi-
cal. For the Americans, according to Harry Hopkins’s diary, had expected
the Russians to team up with the British at Teheran in favour of a Balkan
rather than a Normandy operation in 1944 — an expectation which showed
their blindness to the long-range political aims of Stalin’s strategy. He
naturally wished to see the British effort kept well away from eastern
Europe, and turned from Italy towards France.
So Churchill and Alanbrooke were pushed into a definite commitment
which neither of them liked. Indeed, almost on the eve of the Normandy
landing, Alanbrooke wrote in his diary that he was ‘tom to shreds with
doubts and misgivings. . .The cross-Channel operation is just eating into
my heart’ — and feared that it would prove ‘the most ghastly disaster of
the war’. Even after victory in Normandy was complete, he continued, at
successive stages of the advance into Germany, to express pessimistic
doubts about the prospect of early victory in that quarter.
But from the time of the Normandy landing Alanbrooke ceased, and
Churchill too, to have any important influence on the course of the war —
or on its sequel. Both strategically and politically, American influence
became overwhelmingly predominant, and dictated the Allies’ course.
Indeed, when the British Prime Minister began to see the ominous
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consequences of the ‘unconditional surrender’ policy, which he had so
lightly adopted in company with Roosevelt, he was powerless to modify
it. He had in effect become, as he earlier proclaimed himself, merely the
American President’s ‘lieutenant’.
In the tactical field, a British influence was sustained by Montgomery —
first as executive commander of the Allied forces in Normandy, and then,
after the break-out, as commander of the British in this theatre of war.
The inter-allied conflict now became mainly a tug-of-war between Mont-
gomery on the one hand, and Bradley — plus his insubordinate subordinate
Patton — on the other hand, with Eisenhower as the rope.
In the first stage, until Eisenhower took over charge in the field, Mont-
gomery was the chief target of criticism — and came under heavy fire from
the American generals both at the time and in their memoirs later. It is
easy to understand how his manner irritated them — both Eisenhower and
Bradley were marvellously patient until exasperated beyond endurance.
But much of the criticism is not borne out by analysis of the operations.
On the whole, his plan of levering the enemy off balance was ably con-
ducted, and the checks suffered in its development were more the fault of
the executants, British and American.
In regard to the exploitation of the break-out, Eisenhower has been the
chief target of criticism— particularly from the British, and above all from
Montgomery. The failure to end the war in 1944 is attributed by them to
Eisenhower’s belief in a ‘ broad front ’ advance, in contrast to a concentrated
thrust along one line, as Montgomery desired. But analysis reduces the
significance of this difference, and of the whole argument that it was
decisive in the frustration of the Allied pursuit from Normandy towards
the Rhine. For the allotment of supplies given to Patton, so that he could
continue his advance on the right wing, was merely 500 tons a day more
than it had while halted— and the total, 2,500 tons, was only a small fraction
of what was sent to the left wing, where Montgomery was advancing
along with Hodges. Moreover, the extra allotment to Patton was much less
than what was wasted on the left wing through various miscalculations,
particularly a superfluous airborne attack near Toumai that Montgomery
planned, which entailed a loss of over 800 tons of supplies a day for six
crucial days before it was cancelled.
Most fatal of all to the prospect of reaching the Rhine, and preventing
the disorganised enemy rallying, was the British pause from 4 to 7 Sep-
tember after reaching Brussels and Antwerp. That is hard to reconcile
with Montgomery’s declared aim, in his drive from the Seine, ‘to keep the
enemy on the run straight through to the Rhine, and “bounce” our way
across the river before the enemy succeeded in reforming a front to oppose
us’. Persistent pace and pressure is the key to success in any deep penetra-
tion or pursuit, and even a day’s pause may forfeit it. The lengthy pause
at Antwerp was due partly to a general tendency to relax and rest after
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the dash from the Seine, but also to the over-confident assumption that
the Germans were incapable of rallying.
Underlying these mistakes in the pursuit was a deeper one. For the root
of all the Allied troubles at this time of supreme opportunity was that
none of the top planners had foreseen such a complete collapse of the
enemy as occurred in August. They had not made the necessary prepara-
tions for exploiting it instantly by a rapid, long-range thrust. It is beside
the point for them to blame each other for mistakes and delays in the
follow-up. Basically they were all at fault before it started.
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CHAPTER XXV
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE
SECOND WORLD WAR
T he fundamental differences between the democracies and the dic-
tatorships, National Socialist, Fascist or Communist, in the second
world war can be seen in their diplomacy as in their military
strategy. The conciliation of neutrals, the maintenance of smooth relations
between allies, a realisation that in the long run national claims must take
account of the interests of other powers, all these features of a prudent
diplomacy were far more evident on the side of the democracies. German
policy since Bismarck, whether under William II or under the Weimar
Republic, had never been remarkable for a sense of limits. Hitler exag-
gerated the faults of earlier regimes; the crude maxims set out in Mein
Kampf really represented the sum of his political ideas just as the Blitzkrieg,
a sudden and overwhelming deployment of superior force, was his
favourite method. He carried out important diplomatic moves mainly by
personal interviews in which he could use his tactics of bluster and cun-
ning . 1 He paid little attention to his professional advisers — indeed he
regarded the German Foreign Office as politically unreliable — and rarely
tried to get the free, wholehearted assent even of his allies. At his meetings
with Mussolini Hitler did nearly all the talking; his Foreign Minister
Ribbentrop, who reflected his master’s qualities as far as his limited
ability allowed, was no less domineering at his interviews with Ciano, and
the German military chiefs hardly troubled to hide their contempt for the
Italians. There was no German-Italian liaison at a high level corresponding
to the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff at Washington. Mussolini
reached the conclusion very soon after he had brought Italy into the war
that Hitler was less concerned to satisfy Italian territorial demands than
to conciliate France (at least temporarily, though he never intended to
keep his promises to the Vichy government). Mussolini undertook his
attack on Greece without consulting the Germans; Hitler disapproved
of it because he thought that it might lead to British action such as the
bombing of the Rumanian oil-fields. In return Hitler did not tell Mussolini
of his intention to attack Russia until a week before the German offensive
opened. It is not to be wondered that Mussolini, who now had no escape
from the consequences of abetting German aggression, was anxious that
the Germans in Russia should not succeed too easily since a complete
1 General Franco was one of the few lesser figures whose bland self-assurance Hitler could
not shake. Franco kept Hitler waiting for an hour before their meeting at Hendaye in
October 1940, and insisted on taking ius usual siesta after lunch.
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German victory would mean the reduction of Italy to vassalage. There
were no detailed German-Italian plans of action in 1942 to meet a possible
Allied landing in North Africa. In the final attempt to hold Tunisia, where
the Italians hoped for political control, the Germans practically dis-
regarded their presence.
Hitler’s relations with Japan were more distant and necessarily more
careful. He could not bully the Japanese or do much to influence their
decisions; he was a little disturbed over the extent of their early victories
and, according to Goebbels’s diary, uneasy about a possible ‘ Yellow Peril
To the Russians Hitler was as distrustful and deceitful as they were to him.
The Russo-German economic agreement of February 1940 allowed Ger-
many twenty-seven months for carrying out her deliveries to the U.S.S.R.,
while the latter had to fulfil their promises within eighteen months. 1
Hence, when, in December 1940, Hitler decided to attack Russia, he
knew that Germany would not have to implement her part of the
bargain.
Hitler could not even feel certain of the subservient French government
installed at Vichy. He exaggerated the chances of spirited action by this
group of defeated and defeatist figures who continued, under the nominal
direction of a secretive old man, the personal intrigues which had dis-
figured the last years of the Third Republic. At the same time Hitler did
not attempt a real conciliation of French sentiment ; the virtual annexation
of Alsace-Lorraine, the deportation of Frenchmen, the outrageous costs
of the army of occupation, the refusal to return French prisoners of war,
the execution of hostages, destroyed any chance of genuine collaboration
except from a few politicians, industrialists or military men of poor judge-
ment. After the entry of the United States into the war the French
industrialists who had been willing to take a profitable part in a German-
controlled Europe— which at least would not be Communist — began to
have their doubts about an ultimate German victory.
The German inability to think politically in terms other than those of
force and exploitation showed itself in the fate of the ‘New Order’
announced for Europe in September 1940. There was anyhow no likeli-
hood of organising Europe as a single community under German leader-
ship in a manner satisfactory to the nationalities concerned. The concept
of the ‘New Order’ was based on muddled National Socialist thinking
about ‘living space’ ( Lebensraum ), but, in spite of the vague terms in
which it was expressed, the idea of a large, ordered community in a
regime of planned production and exchange might have had an appeal to
European peoples wrecked by war; Great Britain might thus have been
left in isolated and hopeless resistance to a continent which preferred peace
and material prosperity under German direction to the prospect of endless
1 The reason for this difference was that Russia was supplying, mainly, raw materials,
whereas Germany was sending finished goods which had to be manufactured.
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fighting. 1 Unfortunately for the Nazi propagandists, Hitler was never
much interested in the plan; although he boasted of a ‘thousand year
Reich’, he continued to think almost exclusively in terms of conquests
and annexations. The ‘New Order’ was dropped in theory before the
Germans had to abandon it in practice. Strange as it seems in retrospect,
the Germans had not provided for a long war, and, when in 1943 they
found themselves fighting a war for survival, they intensified their plunder
and exploitation of conquered countries and their suppression of public
and private liberties. The treatment of the Jews throughout the war was
not only a lasting stain on the German character — no alibi is possible for
the Germans as a nation — but was also politically and militarily irrelevant
to the chances of victory, and merely added to the detestation of German
rule by all civilised men.
The diplomacy of the U.S.S.R. resembled that of the Axis powers in its
lack of scruple; there was little to choose between the Russian attitude
towards the Baltic States and the German attitude towards the smaller
neutrals or between German and Russian behaviour towards the Poles.
Russian, like German, diplomacy was under the close direction of a
dictator and his immediate confidants. The combination of Stalin and
Molotov remained unbroken throughout the war. German as well as
Allied negotiators were baffled by Molotov’s blank negatives and unwilling-
ness to consider the claims of any state other than the U.S.S.R. Russian
ambassadors had little freedom of negotiation; foreign ambassadors in
Moscow, as Sir Stafford Cripps (British Ambassador, 1940-1) found to
his dismay, rarely saw Stalin or even Molotov. The Soviet leaders were
suspicious of their allies, and apt to take or pretend offence over trifles.
They often exaggerated their suspicions for their own purposes, but there
was a substratum of genuineness in them if only because the Russians
could not believe that the Western powers were not as crafty and deceitful
as themselves. During their period of collaboration with the Germans
the Russians distrusted Hitler’s offers but accepted under protest every
German move against them, while they seized all territory within their
reach which might be to their military advantage. Thus, on 30 August 1940,
the Germans surprised them by guaranteeing what remained of Rumanian
territory after the return of half of Transylvania to Hungary, and after the
Russians themselves had taken Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. When
German troops entered Bulgaria in March 1941 the Russians did no more
1 The Vichy minister Baudouin described one of Churchill’s speeches in August 1940
about fighting a long war until victory as ‘ce fatalisme de destruction’ (P. Baudouin, Neuf
mois au Gouvernement (1948), p. 309). The British Foreign Office realised the danger of the
German propaganda. They proposed that Keynes should broadcast a practical answer that
Great Britain had more to offer to Europe in the form of an order based on sterling and
linked with the free societies of the Commonwealth than Germany could provide in an
order based on the mark and subject to German economic domination.
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than protest, though they were now threatened with attack from the south
against the Ukraine, the centres of industry around Stalingrad, and the
oil-fields of the Caucasus. They could hardly have carried further their
appeasement of Germany in the summer of 1941. Hitler did not give them
the option of anything less than complete military surrender since he was
determined to destroy once and for -all Russian armed strength.
After the German attack, one form of Russian political action —
propaganda in the German interest against Great Britain — ceased, though
the Russians continued indirectly to harass British plans by demands for
the opening of a second front long before an operation of this kind had
a chance of success. Maisky, their Ambassador in London, openly en-
couraged the critics of the British government. 1 In these circumstances
there could be no co-operation with Great Britain on such close terms as
that between the British and Americans. Churchill attempted a personal
correspondence with Stalin, but it was never very cordial on the Russian
side; in June 1943 the correspondence seemed like coming to an abrupt
end owing to the British inability or, as Stalin chose to put it, unwillingness
to open a second front in western Europe.
Inevitably, therefore, as the war took a more favourable turn for the
Allies, in large part owing to the Russian successes, Soviet policy towards
them became more distant, secretive, and deceitful. The Russian view of
the future was that they must continue to defend themselves against the
consequences of a victory of the capitalist democracies as well as against
a possible revival of German aggression. The Russians thought in old-
fashioned military terms; they had tried between 1939 and 1941 to extend
their own frontiers to form a glacis against Germany; they intended to
reconstruct this glacis by controlling the governments of all the states on
their western borders and as far as their armies could reach. Until they
were in occupation of the territory they wished to control, they had to
temporise and engage in ‘double talk’ with the British and Americans
about the re-establishment of national independence and freely elected
governments in the countries liberated from German rule.
American diplomacy was totally different from that of the U.S.S.R. and
the Axis dictatorships. The President had greater personal power than a
British Prime Minister, but Roosevelt’s freedom of action, until after
1941, was more restricted by a highly organised public opinion. Roosevelt
and most of his advisers were aware of the danger to the United States from
a German, and still more from a German-Japanese, victory. The United
States might well be excluded from the raw materials of the Middle and
Far East and German influence might spread in Latin America. After the
1 The Foreign Office thought it better to disregard the extent to which Maisky abused his
position as an ambassador, but Eden felt it necessary to speak to him about the matter in
September 1942.
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destruction of political liberty in Europe Hitler would want to undermine
democratic institutions everywhere in the western hemisphere. Most
Americans, however, in spite of their dislike of dictatorship and sympathy
for Great Britain and France, did not feel responsible for the survival of
democracy in Europe, still less for the survival of the British Empire; their
first care was that the United States should avoid what, in the mood created
by revisionist historians (and German propaganda), seemed to have been
a mistaken policy of intervention in the first world war. As late as July
1939 Congress had refused to repeal the clauses in the neutrality legislation
which prevented belligerents from buying arms in the United States.
Roosevelt was able to get this embargo removed early in November 1939,
but United States ships were forbidden to carry munitions to belligerents
or to enter areas designated by the President as combat zones. At a con-
ference of American republics held at Panama in October 1939, a ‘ security
zone’ was established to exclude acts of war from the seas around the
western hemisphere (except for Canada and the ‘ undisputed colonies and
possessions of European countries ’). This declaration of Panama was not
valid in international law; the British navy disregarded it at the battle of
the River Plate. The only method of enforcing it would have been by
belligerent action which was just what the Americans were unwilling to
take. The surest way of avoiding American involvement in the war would
have been to persuade the belligerents to end it; Roosevelt sent Sumner
Welles, Under-Secretary of State, to London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin in
February-March 1940 to sound out the possibility of a negotiated peace.
The British and French were afraid that Welles might suggest a settlement
which would leave Hitler in power, and would therefore be only an uneasy
truce. The German invasion of Norway and Denmark took place before
any sequel could be given to Welles’s discussions.
The collapse of France revealed to the American public their danger.
The French and Dutch possessions in the western hemisphere might fall
into German hands; the prospect of a defeat of Great Britain was far more
alarming. The United States would then have to protect herself, and Latin
America, on two oceans with a navy adequate only for one of them. A con-
siderable section of American opinion at the time of the French defeat
believed that Great Britain was now a bad risk and must be left to her
fate while the people of the United States concentrated on their own
defence. Fortunately the President thought otherwise.
The danger of the Axis powers getting control of territory in the New
World was met by a resolution of Congress that the United States would
not recognise the transfer of territory in the western hemisphere from one
European power to another. A meeting of American republics at Havana
in July 1940 supported the resolution (with Argentina at first disagreeing).
Roosevelt had to fight a presidential election in November 1940. He was
re-elected, but he failed to get the Republican party to accept a ‘bi-
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partisan ’ foreign policy and had to declare that Americans would not be
sent abroad to fight in a foreign war. On the other hand he maintained his
plan to include British requirements in future American defence pro-
grammes. After his re-election he could be firmer about aid to Great
Britain. He suggested ‘Lend-Lease’ in December 1940. Earlier, in Sep-
tember, on the announcement of the Tripartite pact between Germany,
Italy, and Japan, 1 the President had decided, after consultation with
Great Britain, that, if the United States were forced into war, she would
act offensively in the Atlantic and defensively in the Pacific. This plan to
deal first with Germany became the basis of Anglo-American strategy.
Secret staff meetings began at Washington in January 1941 ; out of these
meetings arose at the end of the year the Combined Anglo-American
Chiefs of Staff Committee which became the organ for co-ordinating and
directing the war effort of the two powers.
From this time Anglo-American co-operation was continuous. This
co-operation was closer on the military than on the diplomatic side; it was
less easy to work out a ‘ combined ’ diplomatic policy dealing with long-
range interests than a military policy concerned with the immediate aim
of defeating a common enemy; even so, the ‘defeat of the enemy’ itself
did not have quite the same meaning for the British and the Americans.
The normal diplomatic liaison, however, was supplemented by Churchill’s
personal correspondence with Roosevelt. Churchill began this exchange
(with the Prime Minister's approval) when he was First Lord of the
Admiralty; the original purpose of his messages was merely informative,
but, after Churchill himself became Prime Minister, and especially after
the United States entered the war, the correspondence became of the
highest importance in the framing of policy. The personal liaison was also
valuable because the relations between the President and the American
Secretary of State were less close than those between the British Prime
Minister and Foreign Secretary. Churchill was the more active correspon-
dent; from May 1940 he sent about a thousand messages and received
about eight hundred, mostly in the form of replies. There was a certain
risk that Churchill, though he kept the Foreign Office informed of what
he was writing, might emphasise too strongly his personal views. Further-
more, in the latter part of the war Roosevelt was a little uneasy, and
perhaps a little jealous, of Churchill taking the lead in policy-making.
Americans in all spheres of joint action tended to be on their guard against
British skill in negotiation. Even in the early days of staff conversations the
Americans were warned by their own authorities that the British would
have drawn up their proposals ‘with chief regard for the support of the
British Commonwealth. Never absent from British minds are their post-
1 The Tripartite Pact pledged the signatories to mutual aid if any one of them were
attacked by a power not already taking part in the European war or the hostilities in China.
The only power likely to make such an attack was the United States.
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war interests, commercial and military.’ 1 Churchill’s powers of persuasion
were regarded with caution. The American Admiral Leahy wrote of Harry
Hopkins, another of the President’s confidants, that ‘nobody could fool
him, not- even Churchill’. 2
In the first months of the war one of the urgent tasks of British diplo-
macy was to persuade neutral countries, and especially the United States,
to accept measures necessary for enforcing the economic blockade of
Germany. The term ‘economic warfare’ rather than the older term
‘blockade’ was used to cover the effort to dislocate the economic life of
Germany by preventing her from maintaining her overseas trade or
obtaining commodities essential for the prosecution of the war. The
British government in this early period was over-confident about the effects
of economic warfare just as the Germans relied too much upon the
Blitzkrieg. The Germans did not realise until too late the need to mobilise
all their economic resources; the British overlooked the fact that, until
the expensive failure of the Blitzkrieg against Russia, the Germans were
not using up their reserves of material and productive power, and were
therefore not being brought to a standstill by the denial of imports from
overseas.
British negotiations with the neutrals were carried out in detail by
representatives of the Ministry of Economic Warfare attached to the
Diplomatic Missions, 3 though the Ambassador would take personal con-
trol of any business likely to cause political tension. In view of past Ameri-
can sensitiveness to British interference disputes over the interpretation of
maritime rights might well have had serious consequences. There was in-
deed a time early in 1940 when the War Cabinet thought it necessary to
send (jointly with the French) a special mission to discuss with the
Americans the machinery of the blockade as it affected the interests of the
United States. The mission reached a satisfactory agreement, and special
war trade agreements were also made with the Scandinavian and Low
Countries, Switzerland and, Greece, and, on a smaller scale, with Spain,
Yugoslavia, Hungary and Rumania. The collapse of France, the Axis
occupation or control of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe,
changed the central problem of economic warfare. The war trade agree-
ments with countries now under Axis control disappeared; the British
navy could not spare enough ships from the protection of Great Britain
and British merchant shipping to patrol the whole of the Atlantic and
Mediterranean seaboard. The surest way of cutting off enemy supplies
was by agreements with the producing countries. The United States was
1 M. Matloff and E. M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare (U.S. Army in
World War II) (1953), pp. 29-30.
2 W. D. Leahy, / Was There (1950), p. 138.
3 For the diplomacy of economic warfare, see W. N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade
(History of the Second World War, Civil Series, 1952, 1959).
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the most important of these countries; hence American acceptance of the
‘navicert system’ 1 and of import quotas to Germany’s neighbours was
essential. American co-operation was not complete until after Pearl
Harbour, but it was largely extended in the summer of 1941 not only by
the pre-emption of commodities which might otherwise have reached Ger-
many, and by the ‘freezing’ of German, Italian, and Japanese assets, but
also by the removal of restrictions forbidding United States merchant
vessels from carrying goods to Great Britain, and by the provision of
American naval escorts for convoys in the western Atlantic. From Sep-
tember 1941, ships of the United States navy were authorised to attack
Axis warships found in the western zone.
While Anglo-American co-operation was gradually approximating to
a military alliance, the United States was exercising a certain pressure on
the Vichy government and making the Japanese more hesitant than they
might otherwise have been. Petain and his colleagues still held to their
two fundamental errors that a British defeat was inevitable, and that
Germany would allow France to contract out of the war and even, as
Laval hoped, to manoeuvre herself into a favourable position in a German-
controlled Europe. The Vichy ministers were resentful against Great
Britain for having, as they alleged, pushed France into a war for which
she was not prepared, and then for the failure to give her adequate help.
They were angry at British support of General de Gaulle, since every
success for his Movement lessened Vichy chances of getting concessions
from the Germans. The Foreign Office received vague approaches from
members or agents of the Vichy government during the late autumn of
1940, mainly through the French embassy at Madrid; these approaches
were obviously attempts to stop British aid to de Gaulle and to prevent
the extension of the British blockade to French trade with North Africa.
The meetings between Petain and Laval and Hitler at Montoire in October
1940 suggested Franco-German collaboration beyond the terms of the
armistice. The only possible method of influencing Vichy in this matter
was through the United States. At Churchill’s request Roosevelt warned
Vichy that a surrender of the French fleet would have a serious effect upon
Franco-American relations. The British government, which hoped more
of Weygand in North Africa 2 than of Petain at Vichy, made suggestions
for a modus vivendi in which the French would promise neither to attack
colonies which joined de Gaulle, nor to allow their ports or territories to
be used as bases for attacks on Great Britain; the British government, in
return, would discuss concessions about French trans-Mediterranean trade.
Nothing came of the proposals; the French economic demands were too
high.
1 A ‘navicert’ was a certificate obtained from British representatives in an exporting
country that goods destined for European countries were not intended for Germany.
2 General Weygand had been appointed Delegate-General of the French Vichy govern-
ment in North Africa in September 1940.
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After the failure of these approaches the Foreign Office lost hope of
Vichy; Admiral Darlan 1 was as collaborationist and anti-British as Laval,
without Laval’s astuteness. The Americans, however, still thought that
concessions might have an effect upon Weygand. For this reason they
decided to send a limited quantity of supplies to North Africa. The British
government thought this plan useless and even dangerous, but were willing
to let it be given a trial. The German attack on Russia did not affect Vichy
policy. In May 1941 Petain had made a strongly collaborationist broad-
cast. After the opening of the Russian campaign he was sure that the
Germans would be in Moscow and on the Don by the end of the year and
would then return to defeat Great Britain.
The American entry into the war did not encourage Petain to make
overtures to the Allies. He merely regretted American belligerency; he
told the United States Ambassador at Vichy that, if the Germans insisted
upon an alteration in Franco-American relations, France would have to
agree; otherwise she would remain neutral. None the less, although the
Americans were as anxious as the British to keep Franco-German colla-
boration within the bounds of the armistice, they were now more hopeful
again of French support in the event of an invasion of North Africa. They
resumed in July 1942 the supplies to North Africa which they had cut off
for a time after the return of Laval to power in April. There was at this
period considerable difference of view between Churchill and the Foreign
Office about policy towards Vichy. Churchill, though he did not expect
the Vichy ministers to take any overt action to resist German demands,
tended to think with the Americans that they would change their attitude
when they could safely do so. The Foreign Office believed that Petain
would always be defeatist; that Laval and Darlan were not just trying to
placate the Germans, but had committed themselves entirely to a German
victory. Hence the Vichy government would never bring France or North
Africa into the war until it was too late for a volte-face on their part to
make a contribution to victory.
The counterpart to the more optimistic American view about Vichy, or,
at all events, about North Africa, was their lack of sympathy with General
de Gaulle. Since his recognition by the British government (28 June 1940)
General de Gaulle had not won as much support as he had hoped either
among prominent Frenchmen — few of whom had come to England to
join him — or in the French colonial empire, though here the adherence of
French Equatorial Africa to his movement was economically and strategi-
cally valuable. General de Gaulle was not easy to deal with ; his concern
for the honour and status of France too often overlooked the fact that
French recovery depended upon an Anglo-American victory. He was
causing difficulties for Great Britain in Syria and the Lebanon, where,
1 Admiral Darlan became Vice-Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs in February 1941 .
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when these former French mandated territories were recovered from
Vichy control mainly by British arms, General de Gaulle had agreed to a
proclamation granting independence. He continually postponed the im-
plementation of this grant, and alleged that British pressure upon him to
carry it out in detail was an attempt to get rid of French influence in the
Levant. Early in 1942 General de Gaulle did great harm to his chance of
improving relations with the American authorities. The British govern-
ment had suggested that he should be allowed to take over the French
islands of St Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, and at
this time under Vichy control. 1 The Americans refused the suggestion;
they did not want to offend Vichy, and were pledged not to allow a transfer
of sovereignty in the case of possessions of non-American powers in the
western hemisphere. 2 General de Gaulle, however, sent Free French war-
ships to seize the islands. The British government had great difficulty in
persuading the President to accept a compromise under which the Vichy
authorities (to the satisfaction of the inhabitants) withdrew from the
islands and Canadians and Americans jointly supervised the wireless
installations.
In spite of these and other troubles, the British view was that General
de Gaulle should still be supported since no other Frenchman was likely
to take his place as a leader of French resistance. Many of the difficulties
with the general had arisen because the British government had promised
him support without securing his consent to any obligations to themselves,
and the French National Committee which he had set up consisted of his
own nominees. Anglo-American policy should therefore be to use the
recognition of the Committee by the United States as an occasion to
re-define its status. In the new definition (July 1942) General de Gaulle’s
name did not appear; the Committee was described as one of Frenchmen
collaborating with the United Nations. 3 The Allied landings in North
Africa, however, brought further trouble. The Americans did not want
General de Gaulle to be associated with the operation because they
thought that he had only a small following in North Africa; he was not
told of the landings until after they had taken place. 4 The fact that the
Americans were supporting another French general — Giraud — whom they
mistakenly expected to get more local backing put matters wrong politi-
cally from the start. General Eisenhower’s willingness to use Admiral
Darlan at least temporarily as the head of the French administration in
North Africa was even more disastrous. British as well as Free French
1 There was a powerful wireless station on St Pierre which could be used to guide German
submarines.
* See above, p. 802.
8 At General de Gaulle’s request the name of his Movement was changed from ‘La
France libre’ — Free France — to ‘La France Combattante’ — Fighting France.
4 General de Gaulle would have been more hostile if he had known that Roosevelt had
proposed to address P6tain as ‘my dear old friend’.
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opinion was shocked at what seemed an act of political cynicism, whatever
military reasons might be alleged in its favour.
The assassination of Darlan (24 December 1942) saved the Anglo-
American alliance from a severe strain, but the conflict between de Gaulle
and Giraud remained. In the end, although the Americans took a long
time to recognise the facts, General de Gaulle, who was abler and more
adroit, as well as having far more claim to represent French resistance
groups, became head of a new French Committee of National Liberation,
but Roosevelt refused to recognise this Committee as competent to take
over the civil administration of France between the liberation of the
country and a general election. Churchill shared Roosevelt’s distrust of
de Gaulle. The Americans suggested that something like the Allied Mili-
tary government which functioned in Italy should be set up in France
until a plebiscite could be held on the future government of the country.
The Foreign Office realised that the French people, after their liberation
from the Germans, would fail to understand why they had to submit to
Anglo-American control outside the zone of military operations; hence,
though Roosevelt refused to admit the fact, there was no alternative to
General de Gaulle and the French Committee. The President held to his
view until after D-day. General de Gaulle would have been wiser to have
accepted this somewhat absurd position in the certainty that within a very
short time the French people would show their support for him. Instead
he refused at first to allow any of the French liaison officers attached to
the Allied Expedition to go to France until he had American signature to
an agreement about their duties. Churchill, in spite of his anger with
General de Gaulle, made another appeal to Roosevelt, who finally gave
way, though until mid-October 1944 he would not recognise the French
Committee as a Provisional Government.
From the outbreak of war British and American diplomacy in the Far
East aimed at keeping Japan from fighting on the German side. After the
French collapse the difficulties of Great Britain gave the Japanese an
opportunity, which even the more cautious among them could hardly
resist, to establish themselves in an impregnable position in China and
east Asia generally. The Vichy government could not oppose a Japanese
move into Indo-China; British chances of resistance depended upon
American support. The United States government did not believe that
Japan could be held back except by force, but in 1940 the American navy
was in no position to risk a war in the Pacific. Hence the Americans
recommended temporary British compliance with Japanese demands as
far as might be necessary to avoid war. The British government agreed to
close the Burma Road (over which supplies were sent to China), though
they set a time limit of three months during which efforts were to be made
by Japan to secure a satisfactory peace with China. Since the Japanese
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DIPLOMACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
were unwilling even to discuss terms which the Western powers regarded
as reasonable for China, the Burma Road was re-opened. Japanese policy
was indeed clear, though from their point of view the timing was fatally
wrong. Japan signed the Tripartite Pact a few days before the failure of
the German air force to open the way for the invasion of Great Britain;
the attack on Pearl Harbour coincided with the failure of the German
Blitzkrieg against the U.S.S.R.
The final unsuccessful negotiations with Japan were undertaken by the
United States; British policy was to keep close to the Americans. Thus in
July 1941 when the Americans froze Japanese assets (after the Japanese
occupation of southern Indo-China), Great Britain took a similar step,
though there was always a risk that, if Japan retaliated only against the
British and Dutch possessions, the United States might not intervene. For
a time the diplomatic negotiations were complicated by the attempt of
less extreme elements in the Japanese government to reach a direct under-
standing with the United States. The latter did not expect these discussions
to succeed, but thought that they offered a chance at least of postponing
a Japanese attack. The discussions reached a critical point in November.
The Japanese negotiators warned the Americans on 18 November that,
unless the United States gave up economic sanctions against them, war
was inevitable. The Americans asked for the withdrawal of Japanese
troops from Indo-China. This condition was not accepted. Hull, the
American Secretary of State, then considered offering a modus vivendi —
an arrangement for two or three months which would have allowed time
for a comprehensive settlement — on the basis of the withdrawal of most
of the Japanese forces from Indo-China in return for a considerable
lightening of the economic embargo. The Foreign Office thought that the
concession demanded from Japan was inadequate; they told Hull, how-
ever, that the British government had confidence in his handling of the
negotiations, and left it to him to decide on the next step. After the
Chinese had protested strongly against the modus vivendi, Hull, without
consulting the British government, decided to abandon it. The Foreign
Office instructed Lord Halifax to repeat the British view in favour of an
interim agreement as such. Hull’s answer was that it was too late to revert
to the modus vivendi. On 7 December the Japanese delivered a surprise
attack on Pearl Harbour. 1
There was a wider divergence between British and American views over
China. American opinion (endorsed by the President) was much more
hopeful about the political future of China. The British view was that
General Chiang Kai-Shek had little chance of remedying the incompetence
1 Sir R. Craigie, British ambassador to Japan, thought that, if Hull had continued dis-
cussions about a modus vivendi , the Japanese might have postponed their decision to go to
war. The Foreign Office did not take this view, and seem to have been right, though the
possibility cannot be ruled out that, if Japan had put off her attack even for a week, the
German failure before Moscow might have brought a change in Japanese policy.
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and corruption of his government; that aid to China was not the best way
to defeat Japan, and that after the war China would not be, as Roosevelt
expected, a stabilising force in the Far East. The Americans were inclined
to regard this assessment as due to British imperialism. General Chiang
Kai-Shek did not improve matters by trying to interfere in the internal
affairs of India. In 1943 Great Britain and the United States signed treaties
with China for the surrender of extra-territorial rights. From this time the
Americans took over practical responsibility for Chinese relations with
the Allies. The British government watched anxiously the continued dis-
ruption of General Chiang Kai-Shek’s authority, and the consolidation
of Communist power, but Great Britain had no means of changing the
situation for the better.
About the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Eden, the
Foreign Secretary, went to Moscow to explain British proposals for Anglo-
Russian political co-operation during and after the war. He found that the
Russians wanted to be assured at once of British recognition of their
annexation of the Baltic States and of territory up to the Curzon line in
Poland. 1 Stalin and Molotov refused to accept Eden’s protest that he had
no authority to agree to territorial changes and that Great Britain was
pledged to the United States not to make any such changes during the war.
The War Cabinet did not reply immediately to the Russian demands. They
came round, however, to the view that, although these demands conflicted
with the Atlantic Charter, 2 they would have the greatest difficulty in
refusing them. Apart from the risk that Stalin might make a separate
peace with the Germans if the Western powers refused his claim to the
frontiers of the U.S.S.R. before the German attack, there would be far less
chance of getting Soviet co-operation after the war if Great Britain, at a
time when she could do little to relieve the pressure on the Russian armies,
refused to allow Russia in the future the frontiers which she regarded
as essential to her defence. In any case the Russians, if they drove back
the Germans, would reoccupy the territories in question and the Western
powers would be unable to turn them out. Hence it seemed realistic
generally to accept the Russian claims and, in so doing, to try to limit them,
especially in regard to Poland. Nevertheless this surrender of principle was
a significant and dangerous step which Great Britain had refused to take in
the Anglo-Franco- Russian negotiations of 1939 and which was harder to
justify after the announcement of the Atlantic Charter. The British govern-
ment had now allowed the Soviet rulers to ‘get away with’ make-believe
1 I.e. the line drawn up by the Allied Supreme Council in 1919, and recommended by
Lord Curzon in 1920 during the fighting between the Russians and the Poles as the best
practical approach to an ethnographical Russo-Polish frontier. The line had two variants
at its southern end; one of them included Lw6w in Poland and the other excluded it. Some
confusion arose because Churchill and Eden seemed for a time unaware of this fact.
8 See below, pp. 811-12.
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and ‘double-talk’ to describe action incompatible with the independence
of small states. Once this surrender had been made, similar claims would
be less easily resisted.
The Russians did not wait long before trying to enlarge the scope of
their diplomatic victory. Molotov came to London in May 1942 with
proposals for an Anglo-Russian treaty in which not even local autonomy
would be allowed to the Baltic States and Great Britain would not be
consulted about the fixing of the Russo-Polish frontier. The British govern-
ment refused these proposals and suggested merely a post-war Anglo-
Russian alliance against the recurrence of German aggression without
mention of frontiers. The Russians agreed to the treaty, but showed that
they had not abated their claim to decide for themselves how much of
Poland they intended to take. If there had been any doubt about their
ruthlessness in this matter, they dispelled it in 1943 when, in spite of
appeals from Churchill, they broke off relations with the Polish govern-
ment in exile in London on the pretext that the Poles suspected them of
responsibility for the massacre of Polish officers and men at Katyn. 1 The
Russians had already introduced various administrative measures un-
friendly to Poles who had taken refuge in Soviet territory or had been
deported to it on Soviet orders. They were now likely in their victorious
advance to re-enter Polish territory; their attitude was ominous for the
future of the Polish nation.
The terms of the Anglo-Russian treaty of 26 May 1942 envisaged the
organisation of ‘like-minded states... for common action to preserve
peace and resist aggression in the post-war period’. This phrase repre-
sented the stage reached in Allied plans for post-war security. In the early
part of the war Great Britain could not give any precise definition of post-
war plans; no one could foresee when the war would end, or what states
would have become involved in it. The initiative in a positive statement
came from the United States. In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt
met on board ship in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. At Roosevelt’s sug-
gestion they drew up, somewhat hastily, 8 a joint declaration of the broad
principles upon which both countries were acting. This declaration, the
so-called Atlantic Charter, laid down that the two countries sought ‘no
aggrandisement, territorial or other,’ for themselves, and that they desired
no territorial changes which did not ‘accord with the freely expressed
wishes of the peoples concerned’. They respected ‘the right of all peoples
to choose the form of government under which they will live’ and wished
1 The balance of opinion in Great Britain and the United States was, and is, that the
Soviet government, and not the Germans (who were equally brutal elsewhere in their treat-
ment of Poles), were responsible for this massacre at Katyn (near Smolensk).
2 Evidence of haste in drafting may be seen in the omission (criticised in the United
States) of any direct reference to freedom of religion. There is no official text of the Atlantic
Charter, as a signed document, in the British archives.
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self-government to be restored to peoples forcibly deprived of it. They held
out to all states, ‘victor or vanquished’, equal freedom of access to
trade and raw materials and would try to bring about international eco-
nomic collaboration, social security, and conditions providing freedomfrom
fear and want; they would deny armaments, ‘pending the establishment
of a wider and more permanent system of general security ’, to nations
threatening aggression, and would further all measures which would
‘lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments’.
The British government realised that the issue of this declaration implied
an American claim to take a leading part in the peace settlement, and that,
in order to avoid unfortunate consequences like those following the use of
Wilson’s loosely worded Fourteen Points as the basis of an armistice and
peace treaty, it was desirable to consider more precisely how the terms of
the Charter could be given practical effect. The next step, however, came
from another American initiative. On his visit to the United States in
December 1941 Churchill was given a draft declaration binding the signa-
tories to secure the defeat of the ‘Axis forces of conquest’ and reaffirming
the ‘purposes and principles’ of the Atlantic Charter. This ‘Declaration
of the United Nations’ 1 was again drawn up in unnecessary haste, to the
dissatisfaction of the War Cabinet. The Russians, whose aims were on
different lines, also criticised the document.
For a time, however, the anti-Axis powers were too much occupied with
the military situation to give much thought to the post-war organisation
of peace. The Foreign Office drew up a number of memoranda of which
the general tenor was that Great Britain should try to get a World Security
Organisation controlled by the four great powers. 2 The Foreign Office also
suggested the establishment of an Inter- Allied Armistice and Reconstruc-
tion Commission to deal with the restoration of economic and political
life in Europe after the war; this commission might develop into a Council
of Europe on which all European States (including Great Britain and the
U.S.S.R.) and the United States would be represented. Churchill was
specially interested in the possibility of a Council of Europe leading to a
United States of Europe.
Eden went to Washington in March 1943 for informal talks on post-war
questions. He found general approval of the idea that the four powers
should act as something like an executive committee of the United Nations,
but the Americans had not yet worked out a detailed scheme. There was
still a feeling that the planning of the World Organisation must remain in
the background. The Foreign Office considered that the prerequisite of any
plan was that the great powers must remain in agreement; British policy
1 Roosevelt suggested the term ‘United Nations’: the simpler word ‘alliance’ would have
raised constitutional difficulties in the United States.
a The United States, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R. and China. The British argued strongly
that France could not be left out or put in a position below that of China. The State Depart-
ment favoured the British view, but Roosevelt would neither exclude China nor include France.
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DIPLOMACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
should concentrate on maintaining this agreement before beginning, in
Sir A. Cadogan’s words, 1 to ‘design all the outworks of the future Palace
of Peace’. It was also necessary first to get acceptance of a common policy
on the terms of an armistice and the occupation of enemy countries. There
was as yet no decision on the treatment of Germany — whether the Reich
should be broken up into a number of separate states, or whether large
areas on its frontiers should be detached or whether some form of de-
centralisation would suffice. The only matter upon which a pronounce-
ment had been made was a demand for unconditional surrender. Roosevelt
had suggested this demand to Churchill at their meeting at Casablanca in
January 1943. Here again an important political decision was taken almost
casually (though Roosevelt had discussed it with his military advisers);
the Americans wanted to avoid the ambiguity of the armistice terms of
1918. ‘Unconditional surrender’ was also a vague term; surrender of
what, by whom, and on whose behalf?
It is a matter of opinion whether this demand was expedient. Churchill,
who consulted the War Cabinet, would not have extended it to Italy, but
Eden and Attlee (Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour party)
thought that Italy should be included. Churchill’s view was that the
demand might discourage the Italians from making a separate peace. In
fact they surrendered unconditionally after the fall of Mussolini and the
loss of Sicily. They would not have surrendered earlier, and their ‘un-
conditional surrender’ was mitigated for them by a promise that in a peace
treaty account would be taken of their subsequent co-operation with the
Allies. The demand for unconditional surrender was also modified in the
case of the Axis satellites in south-east Europe. Before the cross-Channel
invasion of 1944 there was some Anglo-American discussion whether a
definite set of terms should be substituted for unconditional surrender.
Churchill explained in parliament in February 1944 that unconditional
surrender did not mean that the Germans would be treated in a barbarous
way but that there would be no pre-armistice bargaining. Churchill in fact
thought that the terms which at that time the Allies were planning to
enforce would alarm the Germans far more than a vague demand for
unconditional surrender. German resistance was senselessly prolonged
not because of the Allied insistence upon unconditional surrender, but
because Hitler, who could expect no mercy for himself or his associates,
was too crazed to admit defeat, and an internal revolution in Germany
was impossible without the active support of the High Command as long
as the internal machinery of the dictatorship was working.
A meeting of the three Foreign Ministers at Moscow in October 1943
carried a little nearer to decision both the question of the treatment of
Germany and that of the post-war organisation of security. The Americans
1 Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
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introduced a four-power Declaration on General Security which envisaged
‘the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general
international organisation, based on the sovereign equality of all peace-
loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small,
for the maintenance of international peace and security’. The declaration
was made public on 30 October, and the three powers agreed to an
informal exchange of views about the nature of the organisation. Eden
persuaded his colleagues to accept a more limited and directly practical
proposal for a European Advisory Commission to suggest ways of dealing
with European problems after the fighting. The Moscow meeting was held
to prepare for a conference of the three Heads of Government. This first
meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin was held at Teheran in Novem-
ber 1943. The purpose of the Conference was mainly military, but there
were important, though inconclusive, discussions on the treatment of
Germany; the question was referred to a special committee under the
supervision of the European Advisory Commission. No agreement had
been reached by September 1944 — the British Government had not even
settled on their own policy — when Roosevelt persuaded Churchill (before
the arrival of Eden) at a conference in Quebec to accept an extraordinary
plan put forward by Morgenthau, United States Secretary of the Treasury,
and supported by Lord Cherwell (Churchill’s adviser on scientific ques-
tions), for eliminating German ‘war-making industries’, and leaving the
country with an economy primarily agricultural and pastoral. This plan,
which the Foreign Office strongly opposed, would have put upon the
Western allies the burden of maintaining a starving population. The
President himself soon abandoned it.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1 945 the Russians brought forward
something like the Morgenthau plan by asking not only for the political
dismemberment of the Reich, but for German payment of reparations in
kind to an extent which would have reduced the heavy industry of the
country by about 80 per cent. The British ministers at the conference would
agree only to a further study of dismemberment; they did not reject the
principle of a single payment of reparations in kind — on a large scale —
followed by annual deliveries of goods over ten years, but they dismissed
the Russian figures — an equivalent of 20,000 million dollars (of which the
U.S.S.R. would receive one half) — as far beyond German capacity of pay-
ment. Stalin therefore had to accept the appointment of a tripartite Com-
mission to recommend a definite figure.
Soon after the return of the British ministers from Yalta the Treasury
submitted to the War Cabinet a paper on German reparation and dis-
memberment. This paper argued conclusively that the Russians were
making an impossible attempt to combine the maximum of reparation
with the maximum of dismemberment, and that their proposals would
impoverish the whole of western Europe and endanger its political stability.
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DIPLOMACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Furthermore, as in the case of the Morgenthau plan, the proposals for
reparation would have the severest effect on the industrial area of western
Germany which fell within the zone of occupation allotted by the Yalta
Conference to Great Britain. The burden of dealing with the inevitable
distress would fall on the British people, who would in fact be paying a very
considerable part of the reparation received by Russia. Within a short time
the Russians gave up the idea of dismemberment; the Commission on
reparation failed to agree, and the problem was left to the tripartite con-
ference at Potsdam (July 1945).
At this last of the three war-time meetings of the British, Americans and
Russians, the latter repeated their demands; the British again rejected
their figure. The Americans, who did not intend to exact reparation for
themselves, though they would not forgo their claim, finally proposed, as
part of a compromise on the main issues in dispute at the conference, that
each of the three powers should take reparation in kind from their own
zone of occupation, and that the Russians, who had already removed large
quantities of machinery from their zone, should be given additional
deliveries from the zones of the Western powers; the latter would also find
the share allotted to the smaller Allies. The Russians, in return, promised
to provide coal and foodstuffs from the German territory occupied by
themselves and the Poles and from which western Germany had drawn
supplies before the war.
There was some talk — again inconclusive — about the future World
Organisation at the Teheran Conference. Early in 1944 the British and
United States governments began to work out detailed schemes with a
view to discussions with the Russians 1 before inviting representatives of
other governments to a general meeting. A British committee drew up
proposals in five memoranda which were shown to a meeting of Dominion
Prime Ministers in London in May 1944, and were then submitted to the
War Cabinet. The proposals were for a World Assembly on which all
member states would be represented and a World Council consisting of
representatives of the four powers and a number of other states. The World
Council would take the initiative in action to maintain peace, and all the
members of the organisation would be bound by its decisions. The
memoranda did not attempt at this stage to lay down detailed rules of
procedure. There were no proposals for an ‘international police force’ to
keep the peace; the practical difficulties of the selection, maintenance,
location and command of such a force seemed insuperable.
British, American and Russian delegations met to consider the various
proposals at a conference at Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington, in
1 The Americans continued to insist on the inclusion of China as the fourth great power
and as a leading member of the Organisation; they were, however, now willing to give
France a permanent seat on a World Council as soon as the Organisation had been set up.
Discussions with the Chinese took place at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington) after the meetings
between the British, American and Russian delegates.
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August and September 1944. The British and Americans were in general
agreement. The main difference with the Russians was over the question
whether a permanent member of the World Council should vote in a
dispute to which it was a party. The three powers agreed that in decisions
involving action against aggression a unanimous vote of the permanent
members should be required. If, however, a permanent member were
allowed to vote in a dispute to which it was a party, it could block action
against itself, since its adverse vote would destroy the unanimity of the
permanent members; in other words, a vote in such circumstances would
be a veto. The British view was that the smaller powers, especially the
Latin American states, and members of the British Commonwealth not
having a seat on the Council, would object to a veto by which, for example.
Great Britain could prevent any action against herself whereas Canada
might not be able to do so. The Americans at first thought that the Senate
might insist upon the right of veto ; later they changed their minds. The
Russians would not give up the veto; the question therefore had to be left
to a meeting of the three heads of governments.
Before this meeting took place (at Yalta) Field-Marshal Smuts had
suggested to Churchill that it might be desirable to accept the Soviet view.
The Russians were arguing that the Western powers suspected their willing-
ness to co-operate with them; they regarded the veto as a test case whether
the U.S.S.R. was really being treated as an equal. In any case the possession
of a veto might enable the Western powers to prevent Russia from action
of which they disapproved. A section of American opinion continued to
support the veto as a safeguard against a combination hostile to American
interests. The British delegation had suggested a compromise in which a
veto would be allowed against positive action by the Council but not
against the investigation of a dispute or the presentation of proposals for
its settlement. Early in December Roosevelt also suggested a settlement
on these lines. At the Yalta Conference the Russians accepted the com-
promise, but raised demands which they had previously made for the
separate representation of each of the sixteen constituent Republics of the
Soviet Union. They now limited their demand to membership for two or
three of them. The British and Americans agreed that the constituent
republics had no independent foreign policy and that their inclusion would
merely add to the voting power of the U.S.S.R. On the other hand, the
British government wanted to secure separate representation for the great
self-governing Dominions of the Commonwealth, whose claims were very
much stronger. In the end the Ukrainian and White Russian Republics
were given separate membership.
The general conference for the establishment of the United Nations
opened at San Francisco on 25 April 1945. The meeting was nearly post-
poned owing to the Russian refusal to fulfil the agreement reached at
Yalta about the constitution of an independent provisional Polish govem-
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DIPLOMACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
merit. The Russians also asked that Poland should be represented at the
conference by the puppet government under their control at Warsaw. The
Western powers rejected this demand. Apart from the addition of a chapter
on trusteeship and the compromise on the veto the Charter of the United
Nations accepted at San Francisco differed little from the Dumbarton
Oaks draft. The British delegation suggested the title ‘ United Nations’ for
the Organisation; 1 they would have chosen one of the smaller European
states for the headquarters of the secretariat. 2
The negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco did not en-
courage optimism about the unanimity of the great powers upon which
the successful working of the United Nations depended. The record of the
Potsdam Conference (16 July-2 August 1945) was even more ominous for
the future. The Russians had excluded the Western powers from a share in
the affairs of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania. The Foreign Office thought
it useless to dispute Russian predominance in the areas of south-east
Europe under the control of their armies, but they believed that the
Western powers should make a stand over Poland. On entering Polish
territory the Russians had set up a government predominantly Communist
in character and had ruled out the return of the exiled Polish government
in London. They had previously embarrassed the latter by insisting on
immediate public consent to the surrender of Polish territory east of the
Curzon line (and of the variant excluding Lw6w from Poland). They were
killing or deporting members of the Polish Underground Movement. In
the early autumn of 1944 they had done nothing to assist the revolt which
the army of the Underground Movement had begun against the Germans
in Warsaw on the approach of the Russian forces.
The British and Americans had tried at Yalta to safeguard Polish
independence by getting the Russians to agree to the constitution of a
Polish provisional government including, as well as members of the puppet
government, non-Communist Polish leaders from Poland and abroad.
As soon as the Yalta Conference was over, the Russians invented pretexts
for delaying the formation of this new government. They clearly intended
neither to include Poles who were not subservient to their control nor to
allow the holding of free elections in Poland. Churchill wanted Great
Britain and the United States to take a firm line with Stalin over the failure
to honour the Yalta agreement ; he pointed out to the Americans that the
issue went far beyond the fate of Poland. The Polish problem was a test
between the Russians and the Western powers of the meaning to be
attached to democracy, sovereignty, independence, representation, or free
1 The Foreign Office would have preferred ‘Union of Nations’, but the Americans
rejected the term as implying too close an association of states.
2 The British delegation thought that, if the Russians objected to Geneva or any other
place in western Europe, Copenhagen, Prague or Vienna would have been suitable.
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THE SHIFTING BALANCE OF WORLD FORCES
elections. Churchill wrote shortly before Roosevelt’s death that, if the
three powers could not agree on the Polish question, the World Organisa-
tion would have little chance of success. Churchill also appealed more
than once to Stalin ; he told him that ‘there is not much comfort in looking
into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the Com-
munist parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side, and
those who rally to the English-speaking nations. . . are on the other. It is-
quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces.’
Churchill wanted an immediate three-power meeting to secure the
implementation of the Yalta agreements ; meanwhile he would have had
the British and Americans stand at full strength on the lines of their ad-
vance into Germany, and would have refused to withdraw from the areas
allotted to Russian occupation until the Russians had given way over
Poland. Roosevelt’s over-confidence at Yalta in his ability to secure
Russian co-operation was maintained by President Truman. Truman was
perhaps a little more suspicious of British policy ; 1 he was anxious to
avoid ‘ganging up’ (in Roosevelt’s words) with the British against the
Russians. The Americans therefore would not press for the immediate
meeting which Churchill thought necessary. Before the three powers met
at Potsdam the Poles, who could not now hope for anything better, had
agreed with the Russians on the composition of a provisional government.
The Russians controlled more than half the seats in the new government.
They left no doubt about the character of the ‘free’ elections which they
had promised to hold. While the Potsdam Conference was in session the
British charge d’affaires at Warsaw reported that already things were
‘moving in the wrong direction’ and that the assembly brought together
by the new government was ‘not a people’s democratic assembly, but a
voting machine carefully parked on them’. In the final stage of the con-
ference Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary, did his best to secure a
promise of free elections in return for British consent to the Russian
demand for the extension of the Polish-German frontier to the western
Neisse. The British view had been that the new frontier should not go
beyond the Oder; Churchill wrote later that he would have refused any
further extension, but it is doubtful whether Great Britain could have
prevented Stalin from getting what he wanted, especially since the Ameri-
cans were willing to accept the western Neisse frontier as part of the general
bargain to break the deadlock at the conference. The last phase of Allied
diplomacy thus brought nearer to fulfilment Churchill’s sombre words
about Allied disunity rather than Truman’s more confident hope of post-
war co-operation between the three powers whose armed forces had
defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan.
1 Truman has written in his Memoirs (vol i [1955], p. 164) that at the end of April 1945
he was ‘ trying to get Churchill in a frame of mind to forget the old power politics’.
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